You’ll hear us talking a lot about lead generation. After all it’s the end goal of most of our clients, whether b2b marketers or b2c.
When we talk to clients about lead generation we often discover they have a lack of agreement as to how to define a lead. For example is it someone who has made an enquiry, or could you define a visitor to your website as a lead?
It’s worthwhile agreeing on a definition if you’re planning to measure the impact of your marketing by lead volume or value, rather than clicks, visitors, bums on seats or other more straight forward metrics. This is actually fairly essential if you have a sales director to satisfy.
What really defines a marketing qualified lead versus a sales qualified lead?
It’s at this point you should think about lead scoring. Allocating a certain value to a lead depending on where they are in the sales cycle and therefore the likelihood of them making a purchase.
Or looking at it another way, allocating a score based on the activity they have taken to engage with your marketing.
A fairly straightforward lead scoring system for b2b digital marketers based on website traffic might look something like this:
Using this model we can assess the value of a lead based on their interaction with a website – the more they do on the website, the higher they score and the more valuable they are to your business.
Sales managers like this approach because they only need to engage with leads when a visitor reaches a certain score. The others remain in marketing’s domain, being retargeted and nurtured to increase their score. Actually we can setup automatic alerts for sales when a certain score is reached.
The sales person now knows a lead is hot and also has some real insight to use in the follow-up too:
- which web pages have they visited?
- which content did they spend the most time on?
- what marketing materials were downloaded?
- which country are they in?
- what is the name and size of their company?
The list of information goes on and is tailored depending on the need of the marketer / sales professional.
Lead scoring in this way is a great way to measure the success of a marketing campaign too. It can help you to define marketing’s contribution to the different stages in the buying cycle, but also to run campaigns that target specific groups of prospects.
If you’re struggling to generate leads, or to understand where your leads are in the buying cycle, or how to establish a lead scoring criteria, it’s time you got in touch…
