Posted by Tony Jaros on Fri, Jul 16, 2010 @ 09:47 AM
One of the most common inquiries analysts within our Demand Creation Strategies (DCS) service conduct is to evaluate — and troubleshoot — lead scoring schematics being used by B2B organizations to “improve” the quality of leads fed to sales. We put the word improve in quotations because it often only takes a few minutes to see that the manner in which these schematics have been created not only won’t help lead quality, it will hurt it.
Mathematical errors. Overweighting individual demographic characteristics at the expense of the organization the individual represents. Scoring scales that barely differentiate prospects with vastly different characteristics. Ignoring activity-based scoring. Straight, linear scoring vs. taking a more curvilinear approach. Relying too much on BANT (budget-authority-need-timeframe) attributes when it’s inappropriate to do so. These are just a handful of the types of fundamental errors in schematics that we’re seeing virtually every week.
When marketing works with sales to score leads, it is implying that it will be able to deliver better leads at a more reliable rate. When a scoring model is broken, marketing will almost certainly break this implied promise, and disappoint sales (yet again, in the perception of many sales leaders).
A large number of B2B organizations that have purchased a marketing automation platform (MAP) over the last several years have yet to score leads in any meaningful way; perhaps they’ve heard some of the horror stories, or the lack of experience with scoring has made them hesitate. There’s nothing wrong with this hesitation, but it shouldn’t devolve into fear and inaction.
Your organization’s first forays into lead scoring will certainly be works-in-progress, and mistakes will be made. That’s OK, as long as the organization commits to evolving the way it scores leads over time, and vigorously pursues best practices.
As planning season arrives for many of you, now is a good time to either evaluate scoring schematics already in place, or to start to draw up prototypes for testing. Either way, we’d love to help.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Apr 09, 2010 @ 09:18 AM
This is a post that should lead to a series of questions; questions you should be asking yourself if you have any responsibility for the social media strategy within your company. Whether you're executing on that strategy yourself, have staff to do it, or have outsourced to an agency, there is certainly no lack of social data you're receiving. The problem is that it's mostly quantitative about activity and gives you very little insight. Having thousands of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook may make us feel good, but it's fairly meaningless if we don't know what the impact of these numbers are on the business.
While we've thankfully evolved away from the notions that social media in not measurable, the pendulum is in danger of swinging too far in the other direction. In other words, too many B2B marketers are being asked to show the direct impact that social media efforts are having on revenue. We continue to advocate that focusing too much on this direct impact goal is misguided; better to focus on the impact that social media is having on the seeding and creation of demand. Many organizations are doing this by tracking the change in response rates when social media is part of the tactic mix, but it's key to discover how it can raise conversion rates at other points in the demand creation waterfall.
And this leads to the questions. Are you using social media for activities beyond the top of the funnel, such as pipeline acceleration or sales enablement? Even if you're not applying social media to these initiatives, are you even tracking these types of activities regardless? Do you know your optimal tactical mix throughout the waterfall? Do you even have any impact beyond the handoff to sales? Without insight into what you do currently (as well as historically), it won't be possible to gauge the impact that social media marketing has on activities beyond the top (or even before the top) of the funnel.
If you're already asking these questions, you're on the path to gain the most insightful measurements of your social media marketing activities. And bonus points if you got the Pink Floyd reference in this post's title.