Did you know that buyers are more than 2/3rds of the way through their decision-making process before they connect with a salesperson? How can you make sure that your sales representative or team is equipped to respond proactively and quickly to the needs of the customer or client?
Maybe you’ve heard of lead scoring, and have tried to assess the best ways to use it in your company. Maybe you’ve implemented it successfully, or maybe this is the first time you’ve heard of it.
Whichever of those applies to your organization, here we’ll share how we use lead scoring and its relative, marketing automation, to provide your sales team with the insight they need to pursue optimally primed leads when the prospect is ready to buy.
First of all, develop a database…
…usually a CRM, composed of existing customers, prospective customers, prior customers, referral partners, and brand ambassadors. Then, segment them into into categories, according to the build of profiles and personas alongside market research and analysis.
Sidenote: For anyone entering the business community, especially if you’re going to engage in any form of sales, begin building your database of contacts from day one of your career. Use an excel or google spreadsheet if you need to—just start tracking the names and contact information of the people you know and meet, the date you met them, and if you have time, also where and any other relevant notes.
Second, create content.
Great content educates, informs and entertains your target market, as defined in your marketing strategy. This content can take the form of blogs, insights, case studies, videos, infographics, podcasts, and more.
Third, begin delivering…
…this content to your contact list with a series of e-newsletters, using a lead scoring and marketing automation system. At Ignite Strategies, we are intentionally software agnostic but must confess that we have developed a fondness for the user-friendly and powerful service, ActiveCampaign. These systems drop a cookie onto the browser of the user, tracking every activity.
Fourth, set up an automated scoring system.
Using the automations available within the selected software system, attribute points for each activity that a contact makes with your content. As a baseline, I like to apply 10 points for each time a contact opens an e-newsletter, 30 points when a contact clicks through to the content, and 15 points for any additional page visited on the website.
Fifth, take action!
As your contacts accumulate points by consuming content, you establish a series of triggers. For example, the assigned salesperson may be notified by email, text message, a task in a CRM, or some combination of these communication mechanisms, when the prospect reaches certain benchmarks, such as 100 points, 200 points, 350 points, and 500 points. The salesperson can access the automation system, review the specific behavior of the contact, and choose their next course of action. Inside or outside of a CRM, this communication may look something like this:
Hey Fred,
Jason Smith is interacting with our website and content. Their lead score is currently 110, based on their activity with our emails and website, represented as:
Opens Email: 10 points
Clicks a link in an email: 30 points
Visits additional pages on our website: 15 points
Please contact them at your earliest opportunity to check in.
Sincerely,
Your automated notification system
There we have it! Your sales team receives real-time insights into the level of interest of their prospects, clients, and accounts – delivering high-quality leads and enabling a high-level of responsiveness to the customer base.
There are many ways to proceed at this fifth step. In one instance, at a quarterly review, I help one of our clients review the scores of all prospects. We distribute them to each of the account managers as their sales prospects for the next quarter based on the open capacity of those account managers and the type of prospect.
The opportunities for additional prospecting tools with this system go on.
For example, there may be a key page on your company website that indicates a prospect is considering the use of your service: a pricing page, a bio page, or a search page of some sort. Regardless of their overall lead score, when a contact visits that specific page, they are indicating a deep interest or consideration to buy.
Similar to the results of a cumulative lead score, your sales team or sales manager may want an immediate notification when their contact visits this page, as it is time to take action.
This can also trigger an automated series of emails or text messages to the contact with additional content or a call to action which further engages them in the sales process, moving them through their customer journey and your sales funnel.
Are you ready to see how implementing a lead scoring and marketing automation system will benefit your sales?
Contact us today so that we can help unleash and empower your sales team for higher levels of success.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.