Phil Lauterjung

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Integrated Lead Generation – Part 6: Got Leads, Now What?

September 28th, 2009 |

Author: Phil Lauterjung

If you’ve been following along in this series (if not, why not?), you have hopefully started what you need to in order to get more leads.

Now you’ve got to decide which are the HOT leads? Remember, we mentioned before that only 20-25% of your leads will be “sales-ready”. How do you figure that out?

Start with lead scoring. A process that should be done before you start getting leads, but if you haven’t yet done that don’t worry. No time like right now to get it done. You’ll want to take that exercise you went through earlier in developing a typical buyer profile and use that to develop a lead scoring process.

Here are some of the elements to include in your lead scoring:

Demographic Info – company size, annual revenue, geographic location, number of employees, etc. Match with your Buyer Profile.
BANT Analysis – Do they have the Budget available, does your lead have the Authority to buy, do they have a Need for what you are selling, and what is their Timeline? If you don’t know the answers to these questions it isn’t a sales ready lead.
Activity Scoring – There are 3 elements included in this: Recency, when was the last interaction with this prospect? Frequency, measures how many interactions this prospect has had with your company. Behavior in terms of assigning point values to specific interactions that prospect might have that would indicate increasing interest.

There are a number of ways to set up lead scoring, some keep it fairly simple and others use a weighted scale for each element in terms of the importance you apply to each element. The main point is that you need to have some type of scoring so that you make sure your salespeople stay focused on only the leads that have a probability of turning into a sale.

So, what do you do with those leads that aren’t sales ready, the other 75%? You will need people, or a person (if you’re a small company), who are committed to a lead nurturing program. They would keep your company in front of those prospects on a regular basis, feeding them useful and educational material. Your scoring system would then note the future interactions with that prospect until they are ready to talk to a salesperson.

Remember that the effort is worth it. Research has shown that over 70% of those non-sales ready leads end up buying within 18-24 months.

What kind of benefits can you hope to see from a lead scoring program?

Higher Sales Efficiency. With sales people concentrating more of their time on sales ready prospects they can be much more efficient.
Shorter Sales Cycles. The sales team will be only talking to those that satisfy the BANT requirements listed above which will result in opportunities turning into sales sooner.
Higher Conversion Rates. For both leads to opportunities and opportunities to sales.
Fewer Marketing Campaigns. With more focus on nurturing captured leads there won’t be the need to launch new campaigns because the sales pipeline will not leak leads and become empty.

A lead scoring process could be done using Microsoft Excel or a similar spreadsheet program IF you don’t have many leads. However, even small companies can benefit greatly from a marketing automation system for integrating lead acquisition, scoring, nurturing and ultimately a closed deal. There are systems that are available from a couple of hundred dollars a month to thousands per month, depending on the volume your company does.

A good, well implemented marketing automation system will result in a solid ROI for your company. We will discuss that topic next.