Sail Around the Perfect Storm: Lead Scoring

Lead Scoring to Achieve MAP ROI While the Organization Cleans up the Closet

Implementing a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) is the B2B Marketing equivalent of “Skeletons in the Closet.” Few other implementations will uncover the grisly details the majority of organizations have with respect to poor sales & marketing process, data and alignment. Plugging an Automation Platform on top of these “Big 3” is the perfect storm for failed expectations, a lack of adoption and a tough way to earn a living.    

The reality is that these are issues which are not easily solved and are dependent on areas of change within the organization far removed from the MAP “owner”. So – is all lost? Are we destined for mediocre results until these issues get solved?

The answer is; YES, unless you do something about it.

Fortunately, there are a number of areas within the automation space where significant ROI can be achieved even when the underlying Big 3 are not solved. One such area is that of lead scoring, the underpinning of MAP platforms.

Lead Scoring is a great example where you have the ability to choose your destiny. The standard scoring implementation of explicit/implicit scores and a generic lead “fence” is great (and needed) however make sure you temper the expectations of management with respect to ROI.  Bad data will inhibit your ability to score well and poor processes and/or alignment will surely affect your ability to correlate conversion rates as well as change the dials to optimize your scoring model in the future.

Now, let us consider additional implementations of scoring which will augment what is outlined above to enhance your MAP ROI even in the face of Big 3 challenges.

If we break lead scoring down to its core, it is essentially the representation of the sales disposition of a contact. By sales disposition, I am referring to product areas of interest, degree of interest and explicit alignment to target personas. 

We can likewise describe the goal of our marketing campaign efforts is to positively affect the sales disposition of a group contacts. This can occur by enhancing their engagement within specific areas of solutions to their pain(s) as well as acquiring contacts who have explicit alignment to our target buyers.

With this mapping in place, we can begin to see how tightly related we should consider lead scoring and our campaign processes.

Campaign Targeting

The majority of organizations will target their campaign(s) based on predetermined notions of industry, job title, etc. They will go to their database to pull on these attributes and that becomes their “list” which great riches will be reaped.

There are two flaws in this scenario;

a)      We know our data is poor therefore relying on it for “clean” pulls is not satisfactory.

b)      Within the sales process for complex engagements, we are being disingenuous to ourselves if we believe we can actually predetermine all purchase influencers.    

Now , enter lead scoring. A number of companies I have recently spoken to are now evolving to their next stage of lead scoring; one which has multiple scoring models based on their range of solution offerings. With this in hand, we can start to heat map against contacts who are already showing engagement within a solution area to create our campaign targets. Some companies have gone further to actually set a threshold of existing engagement within a solution area as a base requirement to run a campaign. For example, we will only deploy a webinar effort when we have over 200 active B1 or higher scores within the solution area.

Campaign Measurement

The ability to attribute revenue to specific campaigns is a daunting task within complex B2B purchasing journeys. This problem becomes exasperated with bad data as well as poor processes/alignment – once again the nasty “Big 3” strike.

Might we consider how lead scoring can help solve this problem (or at least be part of the solution). If we think of the goals of a campaign as being to forward the sales disposition of a contact and sales disposition is measured by lead score then can we not create a lead scoring based measurement for campaigns?

If we look at the lead scores and stages of contacts within a particular campaign target and then post campaign review those scores and stages, we can build an attribute model to show the campaign ROI. In other words, to augment typical opportunity pipeline ROI for our campaigns, we can now add ROI within the pipeline PRE opportunity creation – and scoring is a great method to quantify that. With a good understanding of our rates & conversion, we should know that the 25 B1 contacts this campaign acquired is worth xx and the 40 A4 contacts that are now A1 are worth yy. Add these values to your standard campaign reporting dashboards to provide even greater insight to ROI.

I will look to start to write more of these as time permits. Feedback is always appreciated….Cheers.

Ryan