Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation - demandblog

The Top Lead Scoring Tip from the Marketo User Summit

by Jason Stewart

I gave a presentation on lead scoring last week at the Marketo User Summit in San Mateo. Aside from some general background on the differences between demographic scoring (based on things that can be gleaned from a web form like title, department, company size, etc.) and behavioral scoring (based on actions a prospect takes or web pages a prospect visits) I gave a few examples of one-off or periodic lead scoring activities that fall outside of these parameters.

Some of my tips can be found in these previous blog posts, Lead Scoring Should Influence Your Web Forms and Capturing That Shy Prospect.

The number one tip that people spoke to me about after the event has to do with the way that Salesforce.com works, but even if you don't use SFDC your CRM/SFA system might work the same way. When a new prospect fills out a form or gets loaded into Salesforce.com, they usually enter the system as a lead. Once a lead makes a purchase or engages with your sales team in some way, the salesperson has the option to create a sales opportunity to help with forecasting, monitor the sales cycle and track potential revenue.

When a lead is engaged with sales enough to be associated with an opportunity they are converted to what is called a contact. So, for arguments sake, consider a lead to be a prospect and a contact to be either a customer or a highly engaged prospect.

If a lead has been in your system for long enough to have been a part of numerous marketing campaigns (or opportunities to gain lead scoring points based on their behavior) but still hasn't shown enough promise to be converted to a contact, then a lead scoring adjustment should be considered.

At Demandbase, if we have been marketing to a lead for a year and they are still a lead (not a contact), then there is a significant lead scoring penalty. Nothing so severe that they cannot recover, but enough that they need to participate in a fair number of lead scoring behaviors before they can reach the threshold for sales notification via lead scoring alert.

Joint Webinar Next Week with Marketo

We have a webinar coming up next week, a joint presentation with Marketo's VP of Marketing Jon Miller. It's on Thursday, March 19th at 11AM Pacific, and the official title is Turn Inbound Traffic into Leads and Revenue.

Register here.

Sometimes I like to give a little bit more of a "behind the scenes" description of the content than the "official" description shares. On the surface, this looks like a pretty straightforward webinar sharing some best practices both on the lead generation side as well as the lead management/nurturing end -- the two sides of the coin. And that is not a bad thing! When we sat down with Jon to plan out the webinar, however, the idea was a lot simpler and the description only really hints at it ... since Marketo uses Demandbase, and Demandbase uses Marketo, why don't we share some background on how we use each others tools in our demand generation and lead nurturing programs?

So there you have it. Jon's going to be talking about Demandbase and I am going to talk about Marketo. Feel free to join us next week.

Click here to see the full description and register for the webinar.

Are B2B Leads Getting Worse?

Dave had an interesting point in the comments section of the last post...

"I *hate* people who focus on a metric and obstinately disregard that it doesn't signify what it used to."

Let's talk about one metric in particular. Conversions. Is the quest to increase conversion rates on our landing pages sacrificing the quality of our leads? Have our efforts to make it so incredibly easy for people to convert made the actual act of conversion meaningless? Is our effort to lower the cost per conversion increasing our cost per selling opportunity?

On a side note, has increased conversions of lower quality leads single-handedly led to the rise of the ultra-competitive lead nurturing space, due to the need to further qualify our web leads?

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section...

Dreamforce 2008 Session Recording: Lead Management 101

The recordings are up!

Here is the session I did at Dreamforce on Monday, November 3rd: Lead Management 101

Dreamforce abstract: Do you understand your entire lead lifecycle? The experts at salesforce.com are here to help! This session features best practices for lead management, such as how to route leads to the right sales teams, build effective qualification and conversion processes, capitalize on workflow automation, and plenty more.

I spoke specifically about the differences between leads, accounts and contacts in Salesforce.com, lead scoring, landing pages and workflow rules.

Access the recording here.

Lead Scoring and Web Forms, Continued

I sat next to Peter Tait, a Marketing VP at Citrix today at the Salesforce.com announcement and he told me an interesting story about lead scoring.

He shared a situation where his sales team told him that leads that scored an "A" after completing an online form were the worst leads coming in, and that the "C" leads were actually performing the best. After some investigation, he realized that people who just plowed through the forms and selected the first item in each question scored an "A" -- when in reality they weren't even really reading the form!

He adjusted the formatting of his forms so that you could only score an "A" if you really answered the questions properly, and voila...his "A" leads were "A" leads again.

Thanks, Peter!

So, What's the Goal of That Campaign Anyway?

By Jason Stewart  - August 6, 2007

I was reminded this weekend of how many times I have sent out a desperate email campaign without really thinking about what I wanted to accomplish with it.

Susan Tatum had a great piece posted to her blog on August 3rd, 10 Questions that Drive Increased B2B Marketing Campaign Results. It reminded me of that old carpenter’s adage, “measure twice, cut once.” Make sure you understand your goals, and what you want to accomplish, before you act. Too often I have received emails or invitations with no clear call to action or incentive for me to act. I bet they didn’t answer any of Susan’s ten questions before they hit “Send.”

Here are her ten, with some comments:

1. Who is the target audience?
Are you really going to just send that email out to everyone in your database? The same email, to everyone, regardless of department or position? Honestly, the COO of the company is not (necessarily) going to be interested in the same things as the Director of Finance or the VP of Sales. Consider sending more frequent, smaller, better targeted campaigns or at least create a few versions of the offer and dictate who in your database gets which one.

2. Where can we find them?
I look at this question in two ways…number one is, of course, where do we find people who might be interested in our goods and/or services that do not exist already in our database? What are they reading? Where do they go on the web? Which events do they go to? Basic marketing…find your audience and get in front of them. But what about the people who are already in your database? Once you figure out the target audience, are you able to easily find that audience in your database?

I would imagine that one thing keeping businesses from controlling the target audience of offers and campaigns is the fact that they have no idea how to pull that audience out of their database. If you are feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of sorting through all those names and titles and finding an easy way to pull all “marketing” or “finance” people out of your database, consider hiring a temp.

Create a new field for department in the contact record, and have a temp pull everyone with the word “sales” in their title and add that word to the new field. Repeat with “marketing,” “finance,” “operations,” etc.  It may take a while, but the payoff is huge. Plus, there are likely some pretty great tools out there to help with the job, like the Excel Connector for Salesforce.com which allows you to pull records out in Excel, make changes and then import those changes right back in.

3. What do we want them to do?
4. What can we offer that will be of great enough value to them to do what we want them to do?
Have you ever written copy for an email campaign and then noticed there was no incentive in it for the prospect to do anything? No complimentary white paper, no registration for a webinar, no chance to be included on the distribution list for the results of that fascinating survey. Occasionally it is good to just get something out there, keep the company name in the front of mind.

Some food for thought though…the email lists I unsubscribe from are the ones that offer me no incentive to stay.

5. How many different ways will we make the offer?
6. How many chances will we give the prospects to respond?
I recently worked on a webinar with a third party vendor. They had a policy to send out at least three email invitations to every webinar, and they found that they got the majority of their sign-ups on that last round of email. When done in combination with a targeted telesales campaign to your most prized prospects, you can drive some decent traffic to a webinar – as long as it has a compelling message and is not just a glorified demo of your product.

Also, how many different ways within the email, invitation, etc. can the prospect arrive at the desired result? How many different places can they click to get to that registration page, or to download that white paper? Keep in mind – that button they are supposed to click on is not always as obvious as you think it is. Also provide a nice, obvious text link. Or two. Make sure there is no way they can miss the call to action.

I’m not saying you should send every campaign three times with the offer presented six different ways in every draft, but you may want to consider that sometimes you’re call to action is not as obvious as you think, or that you are getting to the right prospect but at the wrong time. That’s why that publication gets webinar registrations on every pass, and also why that telesales rep gets you to take his call after they have left their third message.

7. What will we do after prospects accept the offer?
They clicked on the link, or attended the webinar – now what?

Think auto-responders that will send an email to everyone who downloads that white paper with a contact name and phone number. Think quick evaluation of leads before they are either distributed to the appropriate salesperson or thrown back in to the “nurture” pile. Think phone calls from the sales reps within 48 hours (maximum) to see where they are in their process. Without good lead management your efforts are wasted.

8. How many different offers will we need to make in order to get an acceptable number of prospects to become qualified leads?
Just how many campaigns do you need to run? Well, if you have a few years worth of data that question gets easier to at least estimate. If we got 10 sales last year out of 300 leads, and we want to get twenty sales this year we should shoot for 600 leads.

Which campaigns drove the most leads last year? Was it telemarketing? Should we hire another inside rep to generate leads? Do we have enough names in our database to support another rep? And so on…

Look at the history, repeat what works and don’t spend money on the campaigns that tank. We all know the sales guys love trade shows…but how many good leads do you really get, and at what cost per lead?

9. When will we know a prospect is ready to be passed to the sales team?
See our lead scoring entry for some tips on this…

10. How many sales-ready prospects do we need to generate to a) justify the campaign, and b) consider it a success.
Before you act, have you even decided what your goals are? How do you know if that event or webinar was successful if you didn’t have any expectations or goals set in advance?

Salespeople have quotas for a reason. You should have clear goals as well.

Capturing That Shy Prospect

By Jason Stewart  - July 2, 2007

More on web forms, landing pages and lead scoring.

I came across a few articles and blog posts recently that tie in to my commentary about lead scoring and your online forms. One was by Marketing Sherpa’s Anne Holland and appeared in Chief Marketer, about streamlining your online forms for improved conversion rates. She says to  “face it, when a site asks for your telephone number, it's akin to saying, ‘a sales rep will call.’ Many folks figure they would rather not be pestered, so they lie about their phone number.”

A few different strategies are suggested, including leaving it off the form altogether, making it an optional field  instead of a required one, or introducing the request further down the pipe. For example -- ask for the number when a prospect is signing in to your webinar instead of simply being invited to it. Isn’t that person who attended your webinar more interesting to you than the one who simply registered and didn’t show anyway?

Case in point -- when I was at Maxager Technology we streamlined the web forms on our PPC landing pages, including the removal of any requests for phone numbers or even address information. All Maxager asks for now in exchange for a white paper is name, company name, email, industry, department and title (see example). To make things even easier, the industry, department and title fields are pre-populated with choices in a drop down box (that coincidentally match up with items in Maxager’s lead scoring profile). Also, consider emailing your collateral to the prospect rather than offering it online as it can improve the number of valid email addresses captured from online forms.

Removing the request for things that people feel protective of is going to reduce the number of people who either abandon the form or purposefully mislead you with an incorrect phone number. When Maxager stopped asking for phone numbers, landing page conversions doubled and the cost per conversion dropped 40%.

Marketo also had an interesting piece on their blog recently called “Lead Nurturing: Triggered Emails, Newsletters and Webinars” which leads with this question: “…your demand generation programs are running, bringing lead information into your SFA system or other database. What do you do next? Send the raw leads directly to your sales team to qualify?”

Of course not! I would suggest using that lead score again to determine next steps…either pass to the sales rep or put it back into the nurturing pool. As the Marketo blog suggests, every time you come across this prospect you get more information about them -- be it through webinar attendance, email campaign responses or plain old-fashioned cultivation by an inside sales or telesales rep. If they come in to your pipeline scoring a 90 right off the bat, then those are the ones that go straight to sales. If it is a 70, but a soft 70 – i.e. the main reason they didn’t score higher is because you don’t know enough about them? That’s when you nurture them.

As you gather more information about where they are, their lead score will either climb or you can disqualify them and move on to a better prospect.

Lead Scoring Should Influence Your Web Forms

By Jason Stewart  - June 18, 2007

Web forms should be tailored to collect the information that helps you score lead quality, not discover lead geography.

Targeted landing pages and their importance to well-planned PPC advertising campaigns is not a new topic. Part of Yahoo’s new strategy to improve performance of their PPC programs, for example, focuses on the “quality score” of your ad and the relevance of the landing page it points to. More and more B2B marketers are getting this right, but are still dropping the ball when it comes to collecting the information that is most important to identifying the best and hottest leads coming out of their web marketing efforts.

Are you asking for the right stuff?

When it comes to forms on the web, the more you ask for from a prospect, the less likely they are to give you anything. This is getting to be common knowledge, and yet the temptation is always there to ask for information that can be easily found over the internet -- or even within your own database. Is it really necessary to get CITY, STATE, COUNTRY, PHONE NUMBER when a simple visit to the prospects website will uncover most of that information? If you don’t lose the prospect altogether, you are likely to get erroneous information anyway.

Consider creating a scoring guide in conjunction with your sales team. Find out what they consider to be a good lead, and what some of the common traits or characteristics of their most recent wins are. If they have noticed, for example, that manufacturing is a hot space then make sure you find out if that prospect is a manufacturer. Ask them to share their industry on your forms…or better yet, provide a picklist featuring all the industries that are relevant to you right now. By sparing them the effort of typing in their info they are more likely to answer your questions, and if they select something “Other” than the industries you are focused on you don’t even need to spend time researching or qualifying them.


Here is an example of what a scoring chart might look like, rating leads on a scale from 1 to 100 (click to enlarge). By tailoring the information you ask for on your forms to synch up with your lead scoring guide,  you can spend less time qualifying those names before you send them to your salespeople. And they are guaranteed to be names they want to follow up with.

Lead Scoring = Better Sales Performance

By Kirk Crenshaw  - October 26, 2006

Many marketers make the mistake of passing on inquiries (or even acquired list data) to their sales team without adequately assessing their value to the salesperson. What usually happens is that salespeople then have to wade through a lot of trash to find a few golden nuggets to prospect.  In the end, salespeople become jaded, and start to ignore lead flow from marketing since they are generally considered a waste of time and effort.

A means to assess inquiries that flow in on a daily basis is to create a lead scoring methodology for your organization.  It can be as simple as evaluating Title, Level, Industry and Location, or as complicated as including specific behavior.

Marketing Sherpa recently organized a round table that discussed this topic, and have published this report:  Lead Scoring & Management Roundtable -- 6 Experts Answer Sherpa's Top 10 Questions