Today, customer journeys look less like a well-paved road and more like a maze. The onslaught of various channels, multiple devices and countless pieces of content create a convoluted path to your product or service.
As B2B marketers, we are tasked with navigating our potential customers through the maze leveraging and measuring their journeys to maximize sales opportunities. We must be keen on knowing which prospects are sales-ready and which require more nurturing.
Often, we see leads handed to Sales are bypassed or glossed over all together. Why? Sales feels the leads are not qualified, and they don’t want to waste their time focusing on “marketing” leads. I previously wrote about the importance of internal alignment among Marketing, Sales and Product Management to protect customers from a bad buying experience. But what can we as marketers do to ensure a more effective alignment?
Two things:
First, we must recognize one simple truth: the foundation of a B2B sales is people. People interacting and identifying a problem. People agreeing on the need for a solution. People investigating relevant options. And people deciding which option is best suited for their personal and corporate benefit.
The second answer is lead scoring.
Lead scoring provides your company an objective process to automatically rank and prioritize leads on their sales readiness. It’s about qualifying prospects so that Sales can do their job more efficiently and with greater return on the effort. It also helps marketing focus on the channels, messages and tactics that generate the right kind and quality of leads. Then Sales sees Marketing delivering ‘value’ to help them meet their quotas which improves response time and conversion rates.
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The ultimate “win-win” occurs when Marketing, Sales and Product Management work together to build a cohesive customer experience that will in turn generate more closed business. All three teams can be more effective when they agree and establish three basic principles:
- Create a common definition of a lead
- What does the ideal prospect’s profile look like? What is their job title or role, budget authority, decision making status, place of employment, etc.
- Understand what makes a lead qualified by setting some criteria and a corresponding score around a series of activities. Examples include, requesting a demonstration, downloading an ebook, etc.
- Establish a hand-off process
- Document agreed upon commitments on how a lead is to be handled as their status changes in the marketing and sales funnel.
- When does a lead transfer from Marketing to Sales?
- How will it be tracked and measured?
- Set goals - Create reasonable goals for lead generation.
Creating a lead scoring system not only unifies Marketing, Sales and Product Management, but it takes the guesswork out of how the Top-of-the-Funnel effort is measured, and delivers a process for establishing a singular focus on revenue generating activities and performance. Once a lead-scoring system is implemented, the commercialization team benefits from a systematic way to manage and measure customer engagement and the previous cross-functional finger-pointing and frustration is minimized. Done well, the process will have a significant impact on your customer relationships and your bottom line in terms of both operational efficiency and the number of Opportunities that become Closed Deals.
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