Lead Management

• {1}

  Work directly with sales to determine when a lead is “sales ready”

A sales call can go downhill fast if the sales person has no idea what the customer has been through prior to the call. That’s why it’s important to establish criteria that both marketing and sales teams can agree on. By laying down a foundation for the characteristics and behavior of someone who needs a sales call, the sales team can be confident they are receiving solid leads, and focus on the steps to transform that lead into a profitable customer. Criteria should include:

• Demographic Information: Geographic location, company size, etc

• Lead Source Information: PPC Search ad, social, offer, etc

• Behavioral Information: Web page visits, ebook download, webinar attendance, etc

• {2}

  Make sure to implement lead recycling practices

Despite how organized and effective your sales pipeline is, there’s always the need to return a lead to a previous stage. If there isn’t any appropriate way to do so, your entire process can be compromised for the potential customer. To avoid these leads disappearing, you can implement lead recycling practices to make sure that you have a followup plan in place.

There are two scenarios to plan for:

• leads will be automatically recycled based on a set of business rules
• leads will be manually recycled by sales if they are not deemed ready

Once they get sent back to marketing you can base sales re-engagement on a business rule, such a lead scoring change, or sales can use its knowledge of the leads’ buying interests to indicate a time-frame in which the lead should be re-engaged.

• {3}

  Score leads using implicit behavioral data

A lead’s online behavior can tell you a lot about how far they are in the sales process. An abandoned cart can signal the need for a follow up, or a demo sign up could can signal the need to be engaged by outbound sales. The behaviors your leads exhibit often correlate to an exact or relative position within the sales pipeline, and lead scoring is your way of quantifying it. Lead scoring determines where your buyer is in your funnel. Lead scoring should consider the prospect’s interest level, primarily concerning the act of purchasing. For example, track email clicks, ebook downloads, web page visits etc, and update scores accordingly. Also, be sure to score assets differently depending on where in the funnel they are. You might score a pricing sheet much higher than an entry level ebook.

• {4}

  Track anonymous visitors and tie their data to new leads

There’s plenty of ways to track both known and unknown visitors to a website, and plenty of reasons to do it. Doing so helps tell you who is interested in your products. As anonymous prospects complete forms on your website or landing pages, any previous website visits can be automatically attributed to the new lead. This is important, because you can glean information like which competitors they’ve been considering, or what peripherals they plan on using with your product. Information such as this can ultimately give your company better ideas about the landscape of the market, and individual’s decisions within it. You can also convert anonymous records into known customers when they fill out an email subscription form or something of the sort.

• {5}

  Progressively understand your prospect’s needs

Just like dating, as you build a relationship with your prospects, you should be learning more about their needs. Remember, every campaign that a prospect responds to tells you about his or her interests. Every link they click, and every piece of of information they fill out on a form tells you more about them. And you can really be clever with your forms. Don’t ask your prospects to enter information you already know. Use progressive profiling and use the opportunity to find out something new. You can also use this information to target what sort of content may appeal to them in an email or lead nurturing campaign.