Score Leads For Your Company
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Nurture Inquiries Into Customer With Insight From Marketo
To properly score leads for your company, it’s important to first understand that nearly 50% of the leads you see are not yet ready to buy. A best practices lead scoring strategy helps you properly qualify these sales leads, ensuring you spend the time necessary with those likely to buy now while not neglecting those likely to buy later.
The lead scoring strategies and techniques shared on Modern B2B Marketing Blog offer the same proven techniques that have helped Marketo become the industry’s fastest growing marketing automation firm. Posts will illustrate how to score leads, and correspondingly close leads, most effectively on behalf of your company.
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Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus - Podcast Vol II - Lead Scoring
As part of our ongoing series about sales and marketing alignment, Paul Dunay of the Buzz Marketing for Technology podcast and I recently chatted about why B2B marketers should care about lead scoring and how they can get started qualifying and prioritizing leads.
Marketo's Secret Sauce for Demand Generation
You may ask, why should anyone care what I have to say about demand generation? Well, at Marketo, we’ve built a world-class demand generation machine that has helped us in just 10 months to sign up over 130 customers in more than eight countries, including companies such as Thomson Reuters, Reed Business, and CollabNet.
Now, I'm not writing this to promote Marketo, but I think our results are proof that we’re doing something right with our own demand generation and lead management processes. I frequently get asked to share how we achieve these marketing results, so I recently presented a fact-filled webinar titled Secret Sauce for Demand Generation: How Marketo Nurtures, Scores and Accelerates Leads through the Revenue Cycle.
B2B Marketing Best Practices - Fireside Chat with MarketingSherpa's Anne Holland
In Part 2 of our three part series based on MarketingSherpa's new B-to-B Lead Generation Handbook, I had the unique opportunity to sit down for a "fireside chat" with their founder, Anne Holland. She's chock-full of practical tips and best practices for B2B marketing, so we had a great discussion about how demand generation is different from lead generation; the changing nature of B2B branding; topics in sales-marketing alignment; lead scoring; marketing ROI and accountability; and appealing to C-level executives.
Lead Management Will Never Be The Same Again
$300 billion dollars a year. That’s what the 3,000 largest B2B companies in the world spend annually on lead generation, resulting in billions of leads. Yet despite this massive expense, I have yet to find a sales executive who is happy with the number and quality of marketing generated leads.
Why the disconnect? The old model where marketing generates a lead and sends it over to sales doesn't work anymore. Mass marketing, big tradeshows, and buying lists don’t work in a world where buyers use the web, search, and social media to take control of their buying process. Companies today meet prospective customers earlier in the buying cycle, and those customers want to engage with sales later than ever. This dynamic complexity also makes it harder than ever for marketing to identify which programs really impact revenue and pipeline.
Align Sales & Marketing with Lead Scoring
As buyers increasingly use online channels, such as searching, attending webinars, and downloading white papers, marketing meets prospects earlier than ever in the buying process — often long before they are ready to engage with sales.
This is one reason that, on average, only 25% of new leads are sales ready, so you need a way to find the hot ones and pass them to sales before a competitor contacts them or they go cold.
Join Marketo's Lead Management Software Beta Program?
I typically avoid too much self-promotion in this blog, but I'm really excited about recent developments at Marketo. We've been working hard on our easy-to-use marketing automation software, and now we're finally getting close to the beta release of our new solutions for email marketing, lead nurturing, and lead scoring.
Lead Management Tips and Ideas
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Tricia Reilly about trends in lead management software. Tricia was one of the speakers at Best Practices in Lead Management, a B2B marketing session at salesforce.com's recent user conference.
A veteran in the field of lead management, Tricia currently heads up Bluebird Marketing, whose services include helping companies optimize the Marketing aspect of their salesforce.com deployments, and designing and implementing lead management campaigns. Before Bluebird, she spent several years as Senior Manager of Global Lead Generation at Genesys Telecommunications Labs.
Below, find an excerpt of my interview with Tricia.
Drive Revenue With Lead Scoring
Another popular session at Dreamforce 2007 was titled 21st Century Lead Cultivation. My favorite part was the presentation from Jason Hekl, Sr. Director of Marketing at InQuira, which focused on best practices in lead scoring.
Before Jason spoke, Steve Gershik from Eloqua presented results from a study that demonstrated the ROI of implementing lead scoring. The study looked at 10 companies for the six months before and six months after implementing lead scoring, and reported on the average improvement in key marketing metrics:
Four Steps to Better Business Leads From Search
Many B2B companies have a chasm between the pay-per-click campaigns that generate clicks and the campaigns that help turn those clicks into customers. When the goal of search marketing is to drive high-quality leads to sales, no B2B pay-per-click campaign is complete without these additional "post-click" steps.
8. Measure relationship depth
As part of the lead management process, make sure to measure the "depth" of your relationship with a target company. By depth, I mean both the number of contact names you have at the company as well as the quality of the interactions you've had.
If you've had meaningful marketing interactions with six different people from a company, then that company is more likely to be sales ready than a company where you've only interacted with one person. Similarly, a prospect who has downloaded two whitepapers, attended one of your in-person events, subscribes to your podcast, and has recently spoken with a telemarketing rep is more likely to be sales ready than a prospect who only downloaded one whitepaper.
More from Modern B2B Marketing blog.
