Some example characteristics of your ideal customer profile include: the location of the potential lead, the size of the company they are affiliated with, their industry, their department and job title. Having this information will allow you to accurately target those leads which are most likely to buy a particular product.

Two of the most important profile criteria items for most companies are industry and job title. Industry is helpful in ensuring they are the right kind of customer for you, since most companies with a complex sales cycle are targeting a specific group of buyers. Job title is incredibly important, too. In most cases, managers, VP’s and directors are the decision makers; getting to them, or to a reputable associate, is the only way to make in-roads. Reaching the right person on the first try ensures sales reps are making the most of their time.

By building a thorough customer profile, a salesperson can quickly achieve the results they are after without sacrificing any more time than is absolutely necessary. While many software programs make it easy to collect data, marketing automation collects the data and grades it, allowing the savvy salesperson to prioritze.

In his latest article, Carlos Hidalgo included a section titled “Buyers Don’t Care What Their Lead Score Is.” He goes on to say that,

At the risk of being facetious, let me tell you, a buyer is not worried if they took the right number of actions on your site, or if they fit an exact profile you have developed.  They don’t need a scorecard to help them chart their buying journey. When their ready to buy, they’ll let you know. They won’t rely on their assigned score.

So, a lead may visit your website and download every white paper available only to be surprised that you interpreted this as a buying signal (it happens). But, why shouldn’t you? That lead just racked up 300 points in your system and has a high lead score. Because, that lead score does a poor job of reflecting the prospect’s interest and intent.

To benefit from automated lead scoring, you need to take an active approach to qualifying each lead:

• Customize your lead scoring system – With the right rules in place, you can keep a lead from running up its score just by downloading every white paper, ebook, etc. Place more emphasis on the actions that fit an ideal lead – for example, searching for pricing or requesting a demo. You can also have automatic triggers for events that have a high correlation to sales-readiness, like assigning a high score value to a “Product Test Drive” and automatically alerting a sales rep when someone requests this asset.
• View the actions taken - Your marketing automation system should not only list the lead’s score, but also how that score was achieved. Two leads with similar scores may have completely different levels of interest in your product or service. Assign the prospect that has shown high levels of intent.

Comparing two lead records that show intent (left) vs. interest (right)

There’s no generally accepted “good lead score” because lead scoring is unique to the company and the lead. Many companies won’t find success in marketing automation by assigning every lead that has reached a score threshold, but they will find that lead scoring provides great insight into the quality of the lead and results in better engagement.

Don't dive in too deep when you're just learning to swim.

Marketing automation covers a lot of territory, and the possibilities for improving your bottom line can be overwhelming. As a growing field of business technology, it seems like a new methodology or technique is being created every day. If you’re just starting out with including automation techniques in your online marketing campaigns, it doesn’t make sense to utilize every aspect right away. Start small, dipping your toe in the shallow end, and work your way up from there as you get comfortable with the techniques. Remember that poorly executed advanced marketing automation is much less effective than correctly executed simple marketing automation.

Lead Nurturing

The most complicated area of marketing automation is probably the practice of lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is how you convince potential customers to become paying customers, and automation programs allow you to do this on a large scale. If you’re just starting out, consider using simple drip programs for lead nurturing. A basic drip program will follow a straight path and consist of emails with pauses in between. As you get familiar with the system and start segmenting and understanding click actions, you can branch off a little more, but try to rein in your excitement and keep things straight, or you could find yourself in the deep end of the pool, unable to swim.

Scoring

Most MA programs have a default scoring system which should be adequate for anyone starting out. The urge might be to try and customize your scoring system, but remember that making changes will effect your entire database and can be difficult to reverse if you make a mistake. Certain changes are more and less valuable, so the best way to go about adjusting your own scoring system would be to change point values gradually and see what happens to your inbound leads. This way you can get a feel for what actions are more valuable.

Landing Pages

Smart forms and multivariate testing can be great tools for capturing lead information on your website, but inexperience can lead to landing pages that drive leads away. The key is to start with simple forms on your landing pages that ask just the minimal required amount of information to be useful and avoid being intrusive. Over time you can begin A/B testing to determine the right copy for your landing pages and fields for your forms.

Make Sales your #1 Fan

When implementing a new system, it is important to get buy-in from other users. Often in the case of marketing automation, the purchasing decision is made by the marketing team. In order for the implementation to be successful, it should be emphasized that the tool may be called marketing automation, but the sales team will see great benefits as well.

If you take the approach of just dumping a new tool in the lap of your already busy sales reps, they may be a bit overwhelmed and feel that they don’t have time to learn a new system. Instead, you should hold a collaborative meeting and explain the benefits of the new system and how it will make the sales process easier.

Sales benefits of marketing automation include:

• More detailed information in the CRM, including a record of prospect activities
• Daily and real-time alerts on active prospects
• Anonymous visitor tracking to see who’s surfing your site
• Automated nurturing emails to take education and follow-up out of the hands of sales
• Lead scoring and grading to show a rep the hottest leads
• Improved reporting to help identify the source of the best leads
• Less junk and fewer duplicate records in the CRM

Gaining champions in the sales department will help ensure that your new investment is embraced across the organization.

This is how you being to separate the leads that are in the research phase, and may require more nurturing, from the leads that are sales ready and need to be called on immediately. The standards are going to be different for every company, but you should start to develop a system based on the types of collateral that you offer. Most companies have a variety of conversion opportunities and marketing materials available to potential customers, including items like white papers, webinars, case studies and contact forms.

Things like white papers or time spent browsing on the site would be early indicators of interest. This person is starting to learn about your industry and becoming familiar with the benefits of your product. They may not be ready to enter the sales process yet and bombarding them with aggressive sales calls could turn them off to your product. When you have a new lead that is showing a tentative interest in your product, place them on a nurturing campaign to help them along in their education process.

Intent occurs when the prospect ‘raises their hand’ and shows specific buying activity when interacting with your materials. This can be in the form of viewing a very specific case study, filling out a contact form, reaching out to you with a question or signing up for your free trial. These people already understand the benefits of your product and they want to know if you’ll be the right fit for them. They were probably already on your radar; Perhaps you met them at a trade show, they previously downloaded some of your materials or you’ve been nurturing them along the way. These are the people that you should assign to your sales representatives immediately, even indicating with a note that they are ready for quick follow-up. The sales team can then use the tracking data you’ve gathered to craft the targeted call that will tell your prospect that this is going to be a the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Remember, these factors are unique to your company and your sales cycle. In some cases, a white paper might be a great sign of buying behavior. You can start to determine the right indicators for you by using your marketing automation data to look for patterns in past successes and using those as a starting point for identifying your best leads.

One thing that marketers don’t always remember about their sales counterparts is that sales is a fast-paced game and their success typically depends on closing leads this quarter. If they reach out to a new prospect several times and they aren’t able to get in touch with the person, they will move on to the next name on the list. Unless you have a system in place to return leads to a nurturing campaign, they likely get tossed into the abyss and never looked at again. One statistic that really shows the impact of throwing away those leads is this: 70% of your mishandled leads will buy from a competitor within 24 months. Just because the person wasn’t ready to buy today doesn’t mean they should be disregarded. Six months down the line when they are a bit more educated, they may be ready to speak with a sales person.

So how do you as a marketer ensure that you’re only passing along the leads that sales can focus on closing? You won’t be right 100% of the time, but the best way to pick out sales-qualified leads is by using a method that combines implicit and explicit evaluation factors. Implicit factors are what a prospect does on your website. This means deciding a person is qualified based on the fact that they filled out a contact form or did a search for pricing. You can track these activities at the individual level using a marketing automation system. Explicit factors are who the prospect is; For example, is the prospect a part of your target industry or do they possess decision making power? You can start to collect these facts using forms on your website or by connecting with tools like LinkedIn and Jigsaw. The reason it is important to look at both of these factors is it prevents your sales reps from wasting time on a prospect who may be highly active on your site but turns out to be a recent college graduate looking for a job.

While explicit factors are fairly straightforward, determining the best implicit factors to look for is a bit more subjective. In a future post, we’ll discuss best practices for looking at these more tricky factors of lead qualification.

• Automated Sales Alerts – The system monitors all prospects and allows you to set automated alerts when someone takes action, for example if you want to be alerted every time someone searches for pricing you will be sent an alert automatically when someone searches for it.  Along with the alerts, the sales team will receive daily updates of any activity that a prospect has taken in the past 24 hours.
• Lead Scoring and Grading – This aspect of the system is something your sales team will find extremely useful. Instead of cold-calling and chasing after leads with no interest in your product, this feature allows the leads to come to your sales team prioritized in a list of those most likely to become opportunities. Lead scoring adds points for every activity the prospect does on your website. You are able to customize the amount of points and what activities will get points. For example, when they search pricing a lead may get 5 points, but just landing on your page would give them 1 point. This helps weed out people who accidentally came upon your site. Lead grading works along with lead scoring to triage leads, it gives your lead a grade based on how closely they fit the criteria of you ideal customer. Criteria used to grade a lead can be company size, location, industry, or anything else you feel is necessary to give a company a proper grade. Together they act as a great way to figure out which leads you need to follow up with first.
• Automated Lead Nurturing - This is a great way for your sales team to keep up with those leads that are not yet sales ready. Using drip nurturing programs, your sales team can reach out to these leads periodically so when they are ready to take that next step they remember your company. It is hard to keep up with leads that need to wait a little longer before making a decision, and this enables personalized e-mails to be sent without taking any time from the sales team.

As previously stated, lead scoring is an automatic tool that scores a prospect based on their activity on your website.

Lead grading is another tool within the lead nurturing process that grades a customer based on how close they are to your ideal customer profile.  Lead grading is different from lead scoring because it is not based on activity, rather it is based on criteria.

Some examples of criteria used to grade a prospect include:

• industry
• location
• company size
• department
• job title

Other criteria can be added to the list as other standards for grading as well.

Lead grading can be automated, manual, or a combination of the two.  Prospect grades can be automatically programmed to increase or decrease based on any criteria.  Additionally, grades can be manually altered depending on the qualities of a lead.

Combined together in marketing automation these two tools make lead nurturing simple.  Both lead scoring and grading compose lead qualification, which is necessary to make the nurturing process straightforward for both marketing and sales.

Since you have many visitors you may be thinking you have a lot of prospects for your sales team.  Really this just bogs down the sales reps with leads that are not worth their time and effort.  To make matters easier, marketing automation supports lead scoring.  With lead scoring technology you can eliminate the unfit prospects from your cycle before they clog the pipes to sales.

Lead scoring:

• assigns a point value to every action a prospect takes on your site

• prospects will then be given a score based on their activity, such as white papers downloaded, web pages browsed, or links clicked

After a prospect is scored the marketing team can view a prospect and assign them to sales according to score and other criteria.  By including lead scoring, a sales rep has an idea of the leads interest in the product.  Score can also be adjusted according to certain activities.  For example, if a visitor clicks on the career page within your website and then begins to search through your job postings, they probably are not looking to buy your product.  In this case, points can be subtracted from the leads score.

Lead scoring benefits your sales department and also shows your marketing department where prospects come from and how they interact within your site.