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November 6, 2009
Four Keys for Success Using Buyer Personas to Focus B2B Marketing Automation Campaigns
I posted a new piece on my Propelling Brands blog this past week that examines the application of buyer personas in the B2B marketing arena -- which I wanted to follow up on.
B2B marketers find a growing challenge when it comes to actually implementing their marketing automation campaigns. First, complex, multi-step logic can be tough to visualize and model without really understanding your target audience and the nature of the interaction you seek to drive. Second, populating content for multiple marketing automation campaigns across buyer segments and stages of the buying cycle can be ... well ... daunting. This is especially true at a time when B2B marketing is more than ever 'bottoms-up' and relationship-driven environment -- a challenge to scale.
Yet marketing automation campaigns are a critical tool for the 'brave new world' of B2B marketing that has emerged over the past decade. They help us power a more buyer-centric marketing approach through 'mass one-to-one' marketing. This shifts the core of how we engage with buyers in our marketing from a legacy of push/interruptive tactics to a future of pull/responsive tactics.
To effectively implement marketing automation campaigns today, B2B marketers must find a balance -- understanding how granular to go with segmented campaigns, while still achieving the type of scale marketing that led you to adopting marketing automation in the first place.
Buyer personas can play a key role in managing this balance, but they are widely misunderstood and misused. So I wanted to take a deeper look at what buyer personas mean to B2B marketers -- building on my previous post -- and examine how we can be most successful in using them to drive our marketing automation campaigns.
Continue reading "Four Keys for Success Using Buyer Personas to Focus B2B Marketing Automation Campaigns" »
October 27, 2009
B2B Thought Leadership with Neil Edwards
 Through these special blog postings, our goal is to offer advice and insights from top B2B marketers. It is my pleasure to introduce you to Neil Edwards, a chartered marketer and fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. He has worked on a number of well-known brands in the UK and the U.S. during a varied career with The Royal Bank of Scotland Group and now with his own business, The Marketing Eye.
Neil offers a pragmatic, entrepreneurial, and intelligent approach to marketing, and I'm sure you’ll learn a lot from his responses to our questions. Enjoy.
1.) What strategy have you seen work the best for connecting sales and marketing teams?
Sales and marketing teams need to communicate often and earn mutual respect. By engaging with sales and drawing on its knowledge of what customers want and respond to, marketing can develop buyer-centric campaigns that sales will want to support. Similarly, sales can learn to accept the strategic direction set by marketing in terms of key messages and target markets.
In sales-led organisations, I have always focused on developing a rigid process that gives sales a set period of notice before a campaign goes out. The objectives of the campaign, the key messages and the creative are all communicated, the prospects that are being contacted are circulated, and the database carved up and allocated for follow-up. Once the campaign has landed, the sales function identifies a day to dedicate itself to making 1:1 contact with the prospects that have been targeted. Results are collated afterwards and success is celebrated together.
Sales and marketing need to combine to form a powerful business development unit that works as one to nurture a prospect from target name through to customer.
2.) What metrics have you seen work best for tracking and measuring the ROI of lead-management programs?
Ultimately, the only true measure of success is sales conversions, but ROI, as measured by sales income, is too blunt a measure of success in the short term. We have to recognise that in B2B, it is rare to convert a business from prospect to customer in one hit: There are several steps along the way, and it is necessary to set goals for the degrees of engagement. In the first instance, these goals can be: opening rates on email campaigns, click-throughs on links and downloads of product information. Further along the line it is the results of targeted follow-up of the names that have shown the first signs of interest—perhaps agreement to a meeting or a product demonstration.
Lead-scoring and lead-nurturing mechanisms are in their early days, but it is exciting to see businesses like Silverpop and The Annuitas Group working toward systems that work.
Continue reading "B2B Thought Leadership with Neil Edwards" »
October 15, 2009
B2B Thought Leadership Questions for Dennis Head, eDemand Leads
Through these special blog postings, our goal is to offer advice and insights from top B2B marketers. It is my pleasure to introduce you to Dennis Head, a consultant for eDemand Leads Consulting LLC.
Dennis has a unique perspective from both sales and marketing regarding lead generation. He has over thirty years of executive sales leadership experience with companies like Xerox, IBM, ROLM, Octel and Lucent coupled with over 8 years in marketing as Avaya’s Director of Lead Generation where his “lead refinery process” generated more than $1.6 billion in sales qualified leads. I'm sure you'll want to hear what he has to say.
1.) What strategy have you seen work the best for connecting sales and marketing teams?
Things tend to work best when the two teams understand their roles. Sales is marketing's client. And sales can't cold call its way to success. After this, the two teams must align their thoughts around what lead quality is.
Marketing automation solutions make it easier to hold each team accountable for their responsibilities. It's easy to find out if sales isn't working the qualified opportunities it receives from marketing. The teams may need to meet again and readjust their quality levels.
2.) What metrics have you seen work best for tracking and measuring the ROI of lead-management programs?
The conversion rates from marketing-qualified leads to sales-qualified leads. Once you have a consistent qualification process, you can then work your ROI backwards and ask yourself: "What are my different lead sources?" This will help you figure out what percentage of those lead sources became qualified. What's the cost of the initial inquiry? You can then figure out what your average cost per lead is, and that's when your ROI comes back to tell you where you spent your money.
3.) If you were going to do only one thing, what part of a B2B lead-management program would you implement (demand generation, lead scoring, lead nurturing, ROI measurement)?
I'd use lead scoring and lead nurturing to ensure the sales team receives quality leads. If you don't have quality, you won't have credibility with the sales team. Fewer but higher quality leads are far better than a high quantity of poor-quality leads.
4.) Which business practices are working best in B2B lead generation today, and which would you like to disappear?
Closed-loop processes are working best. I'd like to see marketers stop measuring the wrong things. Measuring the total number of leads is ridiculous. So what if you deliver 1,000 leads to your salespeople if they aren't working them?
5.) What's your advice to marketers working with execs who view marketing as a discretionary budget item during a recession?
You have to prove to the C-Suite that what you're doing is impacting revenue, and you can do that with metrics. With a fine-tooth comb, you must analyze what you put into the marketplace. For example, if you spend $20K on a trade show booth, you really need to make sure you get something out of it besides a pocket full of business cards. You need to close deal.
October 11, 2009
Seven Principles for Building More Buyer-centric B2B Marketing Programs
This week marks the first stop in our new B2B Marketing University series -- a program we're taking on the road to help educate marketers about a rapidly-changing B2B environment. We have great content and great partners for Palo Alto (and also for our upcoming events in Boston, Atlanta and Seattle) that will cover a number of new strategies and tactics for addressing these dynamics. (Hope you'll join us.)
Success with these new strategies and tactics requires embracing the context surrounding the 'brave new world' of B2B marketing that we face today. In particular -- and at the core of this brave new world -- is a changing B2B buyer. I've covered this in two recent blog posts -- one post looking at the data that supports a changing buyer on my Propelling Brands blog and a second post here on the Demand Generation blog that captured some of the implications. "[I]t's impossible to talk about a changing environment for marketing technology without talking about how the nature of the B2B buyer also is rapidly changing," I noted in my Propelling Brands post. "The two are inextricably intertwined in a new reality that is both a cause and effect of the digital age we live in."
Recognizing, understanding and responding to this change at a buyer level substantially helps focus our marketing programs. It reminds us that being 'buyer-centric' is critical and that effective B2B marketing -- given a permanent shift in buyer power -- must mold around this process and respond to buyer pull, rather than attempting interruptive and disingenuous 'push' tactics.
"In the future [marketing] is all about conversations," commented Richard Bush of Base One at an EMEA B2B conference for Silverpop I hosted this past week in London. (BTW -- If you are interested in checking out our B2B dialogue in London last week, do a Twitter search under hash tag 'SVPcc09.')
This is the context I've covered in my past posts. But how can B2B marketers better respond to this evolving environment?
Continue reading "Seven Principles for Building More Buyer-centric B2B Marketing Programs" »
September 28, 2009
B2B Thought Leadership with Malcolm Friedberg
 Through these special blog postings, our goal is to offer advice and insights from top B2B marketers. It is my pleasure to introduce you to Malcolm Friedberg, principal at Left Brain Marketing. He has more than 20 years of marketing, sales and business development experience in a broad range of B2B industries.
Malcolm has built several national brands and staffed marketing departments from the ground up. His marketing consulting firm specializes in designing and implementing customized marketing automation solutions for B2B companies. We thank Malcolm for taking time out of his busy schedule to respond to our questions. From his responses, you'll learn what he thinks is the best strategy for connecting sales and marketing plus much more. Enjoy!
1.) Are you a left or right brainer?
We have a test on our website that allows people to get a sense of which brain hemisphere dominates. According to the test, I lean to the left, which means that I am more analytical than intuitive. This view accords with my wife's perspective that my male intuition, or lack thereof, makes me horrible at understanding what makes her happy.
And do you determine which your client is before working with them?
No, we don't have a litmus test for clients. I was a CMO before I became a consultant, and I know that most of us marketers are right-brained. Branding, events, traditional advertising tend to be more creative and right-brain focused. A big reason why I got into marketing automation is that I know most marketers need assistance in this area.
And how does it affect the way you build a campaign?
The way in which my analytical skills manifest in our client engagements is in building business processes. Marketing generally doesn't have a lot of business processes, and so the exercise of creating a well-conceived process is new. However, marketing automation requires that you map out steps to various workflows. As an example, the ability to route leads to sales and then get the untouched ones back for nurturing forces you to think through a variety of issues: what's the criteria for moving leads, how long should they sit, what triggers a transfer, which technology you use, etc. If you've never worked through these issues, creating an effective business process can be challenging.
2.) What strategy have you seen work the best for connecting sales and marketing teams?
There are both historical and structural reasons for the disconnect that exists between marketing and sales organizations. The historical component largely has to do with quality of leads and sales' perception that it could do as well if not better (a broad generalization, but one that I believe is accurate). The structural element is that they often exist in different business silos, independently reporting to a CEO. These are significant hurdles to overcome. One of the things I particularly like about marketing automation is that it provides a legitimate opportunity for marketing to reach out to sales and begin a dialogue about how it can better support sales. The "I'm here to help, but I need your involvement" approach seems to be the best way to make headway.
3.) What metrics have you seen work best for tracking and measuring the ROI of lead-management programs?
In my mind, this is another way of asking, "How does a CMO/VP Marketing sell his or her CEO on the investment?" The simplest way to do this is to calculate your cost per lead (e.g. acquisition through sale) and then illustrate how marketing automation can improve on that by reducing costs (e.g. less spend on traditional advertising, better conversion based on targeting, etc.). At the beginning of the process, you're going to be making assumptions, so your best bet is to grab some industry metrics. Once you're up and running you'll be able to focus more specifically on the metrics that you either have or that are most meaningful in the context of your specific business.
4.) If you were going to do only one thing, what part of a B2B lead-management program would you implement (demand generation, lead scoring, lead nurturing, ROI measurement)?
I don't think that you can focus on just one area, because you need all the parts to build a quality marketing program. It would be like fielding a baseball team with only a good pitcher, but lousy fielders. But assuming we're not all the Yankees (for you non-baseball fans, they have the biggest payroll in baseball), the biggest bang for the buck is nurturing. Chances are that you have a good number of leads coming to your site (if not, obviously demand gen would be your focus), and a few good nurturing programs will drastically help your conversion efforts.
5.) Which business practices are working best in B2B lead generation today, and which would you like to disappear?
One B2B practice that is critical to success is segmentation, because that's the foundation to relevant communication with your audience. The days of sending the same message to everyone without taking into account a buyer's product interest, role, knowledge, etc. are gone. If you're still doing that, it's time to evolve because that's the one practice that, in my humble opinion, should disappear.
6.) What's your advice to marketers working with execs who view marketing as a discretionary budget item during a recession?
Get a new job was my first thought, but that's usually not an option. The question describes a very challenging situation that is a reality for a huge number of marketers. I think that, as a whole, marketing is in transition. The need for marketing to be accountable is more real now than ever. Consequently, I think that marketers need to demonstrate their contribution to revenue (e.g. tracking the closed deals that originated with marketing). Using data to support additional investment in marketing is the way to go.
September 25, 2009
So the Nature of the B2B Buyer Is Changing? So What?: Understanding the New Sales Funnel Via Meg Heuer of SiriusDecisions
Yesterday I published a piece on my personal blog, Propelling Brands, that tackled an important area of inquiry: It's clear that B2B marketing is rapidly evolving; more recently, the dialogue has shifted to re-framing this evolution around what is a changing nature of the B2B buyer. This is a given. "But where is the hard data that this evolution is really occurring?" I asked. "We're changing how we go to market -- and there is plenty of data pointing to shifting spending by marketers -- but how do we know that our shifted spending will better align with B2B buyers' shifting needs and preferences?"
The Propelling Brands piece thus presented a 'bread basket' of proof points from recent data and research findings by firms including Enquiro, Forrester, MarketingSherpa and SiriusDecisions and really supported the thesis of how B2B marketing is changing. The major points of synthesis are that B2B buyers:
> Are increasingly turning to online sources, earlier in their process, to research purchases before ever calling a 'live' sales rep
> Are increasingly leveraging social media -- especially peer communication, such as Twitter, blogs, etc. -- in the information collection phase of the buying process
> Are pursuing their buying process more 'massively multi-channel' than ever before; however, channel weightings and their sequence vary by the phase of the buying process
> Manifest themselves more than ever as a complex, savvy 'buying unit,' rather than simply as a single decision-maker
But what are the implications for B2B marketers of this changing environment?
My post today will dig into implications and leverage insights from a leading analyst who has been closely following the changing B2B marketing dynamic.
Continue reading "So the Nature of the B2B Buyer Is Changing? So What?: Understanding the New Sales Funnel Via Meg Heuer of SiriusDecisions" »
September 16, 2009
Email is the Foundation, but Not the Holy Grail for B2B Marketers
I was thrilled to see in the recent UK Internet Advertising Bureau's survey that email continues to be the leading choice in terms of usage and success within B2B marketing tactics. For those who understand the power of email, this is no surprise. Emailing is extremely cost effective, and done with an appropriate level of strategy, can provide highly relevant messaging. In fact, 45% of the research respondents felt email was the most suitable tactic for achieving their marketing objectives. The dynamically generated, triggered and targeted messaging available today can greatly help to engage prospective customers in meaningful dialogs, both pre and post-sale (fulfilling the old mantra of the right message to the right person at the right time). However, what I think the results from the IAB's research also highlights is in the world of digital marketing, email marketing expertise alone is not enough.
Marketer's tactics and channels are but a mirror to the various ways buyers are researching, educating, and selecting our brands and our products. Search continues to be the most popular starting point for any considered purchase. In the U.K., online continues to replace the traditional channels of print and DM. Accordingly, almost 40% of respondents from the IAB survey said they are planning to invest an even greater percentage of their budgets into digital for the coming year. However, as the other digital channels grow in popularity, we as marketers must continue to listen, respond, and coordinate these various digital dialogs. As my colleague Adam Needles writes, engaging in the 'buyer dialog,' especially across the digital channels, pays big dividends in terms of delivering qualified leads and sales opportunities.
As in other regions of the world, UK Marketers are fairly enamored with the growth in social media. The IAB survey found 60% of respondents are either using or planning to leverage social in their digital strategies. To make the most of social media, however, marketers need to consider the content strategy as much or more than the channel. As Mike Volpe, VP of Marketing for the fast growing inbound marketing provider Hubspot was quoted in a recent Britton Manasco post in Sandhill.com, "marketers today need to think a lot less like advertisers and more like publishers."
As expected, the research also indicates that B2B marketers are leveraging digital channels primarily for lead generation and lead management, especially in this sales-starved economy. However, making the most of a "digital dialog" takes a strong internal process, as highlighted in a recent Demand Gen US study in which 79% of respondents who use marketing automation solutions for lead management say they it would have been more helpful is they had worked to "better prepare their organizations by building proper processes and content offers to feed the automated system."
Help is on the way, however, as leading marketing consultants like Carlos Hidalgo, provide lead management audits to find the process leaks and provide best practice guidance.
The next step in the evolution of online B2B marketing will be the powerful opportunity for developing not just short-term leads, but in cost-effectively building sustainable brands through these online channels. James Farmer from B2B Magazine states that there "is still a great deal of learning with regards to brand building online," and accordingly, his organization continues to promote various educational events around the U.K., helping B2B marketers understand and apply new online techniques.
September 15, 2009
Judging Marketing Automation Vendors Based on Their Approach to Helping Marketers Address the 'Brave New World' of B2B Marketing
Our focus on this blog is typically on best practices for B2B marketing and on thought leadership around the major opportunities and challenges facing B2B marketers today. So it's not often we do a blog piece directly focused on our marketing automation platform, per se. But I was recently asked to contribute a guest blog piece to the ReachForce blog, "The B2B Lead," on our platform and how it is different from other leading marketing automation platforms. The piece is titled, "What is Silverpop Engage B2B? -- Marketing Automation Who's Who," and it was published yesterday.
Putting together this post was a great thought exercise. In approaching it, I tried to not focus so much on features and functions -- as these are constantly changing -- and instead focused on how I think Silverpop approaches the market differently with its Engage B2B platform.
After all, the point of marketing automation is to really to help marketers improve how they market; thus, evaluating which marketing automation platform is best for a given marketing organization requires understanding their specific challenges and opportunities. In the B2B marketing arena, much of the challenge (and opportunity) is related to seismic changes around the B2B buyer -- what the SiriusDecisions team calls 'Buyer 2.0' -- which is a good starting place.
So I thought I would share an excerpt of this post with you and invite your feedback on my thinking.
Continue reading "Judging Marketing Automation Vendors Based on Their Approach to Helping Marketers Address the 'Brave New World' of B2B Marketing" »
September 2, 2009
Keeping Your B2B Marketing Content and Campaigns Relevant by Leveraging Buyer Context
I gave a presentation last week at CRM Magazine's annual CRM Evolution summit in New York City on 'strategic' marketing automation. What was I trying to get at with this spin on the topic? Well, it's easy to show -- technically -- what automation does, but I thought it was more compelling to focus on a strategic view of what we are really trying to accomplish. What is underlying and driving the need for B2B marketing organizations to adopt marketing automation?
It comes down to the simple context of managing buyer dialogue -- a concept I touched on in another recent blog piece on sales/marketing alignment. You want to manage a one-on-one, upstream (i.e., pre-sales) dialogue with a B2B buyer that builds purchase momentum and that consequently hands off a high-quality Marketing Qualified Lead to your sales colleague (who should then pick up the dialogue from where you left off). Yet in order to close a sufficient volume of downstream sales, you must manage quite a large volume of these upstream 'one-on-one' conversations ... and on a massive scale. SiriusDecisions reported at their May annual Summit that in 2009 the average B2B marketing organization started 1,000 of these conversations for every 2.31 deals closed.
What does this have to do with the relevance of content and campaigns?
I think most marketers would acknowledge the buyer dialogue context when speaking strategically about CRM and marketing automation. And data shows that taking the buyer-centered approach in marketing pays off. "Campaigns that are [buyer] event-triggered have a five-times better success rate," noted a recent article on destinationCRM.com," and highly-targeted ... campaigns, whereby the customer finds you, have shown 10 times the success rate over those that are intrusive."
Yet -- too often as marketers -- we completely forget the dialogue context as we develop content and campaigns and put together our lead management strategy. Should we use a white paper to generate leads? What should we say in a follow-up e-mail from a tradeshow? How should our search engine optimization and lead nurturing integrate in our overall marketing strategy?
Continue reading "Keeping Your B2B Marketing Content and Campaigns Relevant by Leveraging Buyer Context" »
August 19, 2009
Advanced Lead Scoring Secrets -- Moving from 'Good' to 'Great' as a B2B Marketer
One theme that has been consistent in my conversations with B2B marketers over the past few months is this: Lead scoring is one of the greatest opportunities and challenges when it comes to implementing and tuning their marketing automation processes and systems. Marketers tend to get the basics -- especially when it comes to core ideas such as scoring against target demographics and applying 'BANT' analysis (i.e., budget, authority, needs and timing). But B2B marketers seem to really stumble in taking their scoring and subsequent routing and nurturing to the next level. In fact, in research Silverpop is releasing this week, my colleagues found that 53% of B2B marketers still don't score, and 69% don't nurture (which requires some level of scoring and is a casualty of low scoring rates).
This issue is especially front and center for me, given I'm in the midst of developing my presentation for a lead scoring Webinar I'm giving with the folks at Target Marketing on Thursday. My presentation will be rooted in the basics, but I'm increasingly of the mindset that such a Webinar also needs to cover the 'advanced' issues, too. After all, this seems to be where scoring falls down.
What are these advanced 'lead scoring secrets'?
So while my Webinar will go into more details -- and also ground these 'advanced' topics in context and frameworks -- I thought I'd present some of the working insights I think can really help B2B marketers take their games to the next level ... and find real success with scoring. So here goes:
> Build the concepts of dialogue and momentum into your model: Given an environment in which B2B buyers have more information power than ever, and sales teams are being pulled into the buyer dialogue later and later, a new opportunity has emerged for B2B marketing organizations to be the organizational 'point person' on engaging with, managing and providing continuity in the pre-sale dialogue with buyers. The goal is simple -- nurturing a lead until it is sales ready -- but to do this marketers have to operate like a tenured sales professional, carefully managing the nurturing process in response to the buyer's signals.
"Industry statistics show that up to 40% of leads may make their first purchase after having been in the 'remarketing database' [i.e., nurturing pool] for 18 months or longer," notes David Taber in a recent Computerworld piece. "This is the whole purpose of marketing automation systems ..."
Yet the sales concepts of building a dialogue with a prospect and of understanding when a buyer gains momentum too often are not at the heart of scoring -- especially when there is over-reliance on demographic and BANT data. Moreover, behavioral score components should distinguish between activity that is increasing versus activity that is decreasing.
SiriusDecisions explains in a recent research brief that your scoring must understand "... the 'arc of activity' that buyers tend to use." Combinations of activity that build on each other -- as a consistent 'dialogue' and that demonstrate momentum in propensity to buy -- should increase the score. Similarly, lead scores should 'decay' after periods of inactivity -- demonstrating declining momentum.
> Leverage insights from the communication channel and the nature of the information 'consumed' by the prospect to better assess a buyer's relative maturity: This builds on the previous point and is perhaps one of the most mis-understood of the factors that go into 'great' lead scoring. Research into integrated marketing communication programs and buyers' information search patterns show that different communication channels and types of information are sought at different stages in the buying process. (Note that this pattern will differ by company, product and industry.) Observing this activity can indicate the relative maturity (and momentum) of the buyer in their search process; thus, it should be a key factor in increasing and decreasing a lead's score.
> Make sure your lead score captures insights from both online AND offline activity: This also builds on the previous point and is another area that B2B marketers fail to fully integrate into their scoring methodology. If your score only takes into account online activity, it is not a complete picture. Make sure that event attendance, inbound calls and other offline behaviors that are integral to the buyer's process -- and that also indicate relative maturity and momentum -- are baked into your scoring methodology.
> Expect your scoring model to change: Before you can even build your scoring model, you will have to examine past campaigns and historical data and conduct conversations with both marketing and sales team members. You will need to look for correlations that exist in your core business logic between marketing/sales actions and propensity to buy. You will make initial assumptions about relationships between factors and build initial score models ... and yet your model still won't be right.
"All successful [marketing] processes are ongoing in nature," explains Steve Gershik in a past post on his blog, The Innovative Marketer. "Tweak your programs, tweak your scores, change the metrics you look at to analyze the scores of your leads. Be open and flexible when you get started and you'll find you have a program that your whole team, marketing and sales, buy into."
It is only through constant testing and monitoring that your lead model will mature. But this makes sense. After all, what you are building in the lead score model is the heart of an ongoing set of demand-generation process -- a lead factory -- that requires care and maintenance. Silverpop's Lead Management Workbook adds: "A solid lead-scoring approach not only helps you to rank prospects against each other, but can smooth the lead flow and help you build a more powerful and accountable marketing organization based on rigorous analysis and testing, rather than intuition and educated guesswork."
> Constantly re-assess lead score data: Underlying your changing model is a constantly-changing set of behavioral data from your buyers. Maintaining accurate scores requires constantly re-assessing and updating the data. "Allow scores to be updated with third-party information such as data-appends or data entry by your sales force," suggests the Lead Management Workbook (cited above). "Automatically add new data as it is gathered over time and re-score leads."
> Work on tuning the relative 'elasticity' of variables in your model: Perhaps the most fundamental 'integrity' issue for lead score models -- firmly rooted in the disciplines of economics and of linear regression -- is the idea of relative elasticities. I.e., different elements of your score will have varying degrees of impact on a prospect's 'propensity to buy.' So make sure your scoring model reflects this.
"The actual score doesn't matter," explains Steve Gershik (cited above). "The important thing is that the point value is relative to other activities so in the end, the higher the score, the more actionable the lead is."
SiriusDecisions discussed this issue in a recent brief, "When Good Lead Scoring Models Go Bad." In one section of their brief, they call out the importance of tuning elasticity in the overall weighting of variables in a scoring model:
While it may be tempting to take five variables in an overall scoring model and weight them all equally at 20 percent of a prospect's overall viability, we advise you to resist. Based on your ideal customer profiling (combining this with activity and BANT variables if both are possible/intuitive to include), choose the variables you believe to be most predictive of a prospect's viability and prioritize your weighting there.
What do you think?
While it is not an exact science, lead scoring is critical to successful nurturing and lead management. This requires that as marketers we get under the covers a bit and address some of these 'advanced' issues -- which is what I wanted to do here. I hope that these ideas were helpful. What thoughts/ideas would you add to this list?
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