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Must-Read Industry Articles

	Mismanaged Lead Management Sales organizations aren't measuring what they need to measure; closed loop lead management could be the answer to multiple woes. By Marshall Lager, DestinationCRM.com

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	Business Gets Social Old-time sales pros always believed in the importance of face-to-face contact. Now new media is making that contact easier than ever. eMarketer.com

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		January 2008, Issue 47

Lead-Generation Best Practices
Putting the Customer at the Center of Your Lead Scoring
By Tim Wilson, Director of Business Process Analytics, Bulldog Solutions

A scatter plot shows leads scored on two dimensions, with the hottest leads indicated by the red circle of The Buying Zone. View the briefing document now.

Does this sound familiar? Your Sales team complains that the leads coming from Marketing are not good. So you've taken the key first steps in improving the alignment between Marketing and Sales: You've qualified leads based on a well-thought-out lead-scoring process.

You involved Sales when determining what attributes to base your lead scoring on and how those attributes should be weighted.
You looked at lead conversion data to determine the attributes of leads that turned into customers.
You optimized your lead collection processes so that you were only asking leads to provide basic contact information and information that you would use to score them.

You did everything right. But, somehow, your Sales organization complains that the leads are better…but still not very good.

Multiple Dimensions to Lead Scoring

The reason for this may very well be because your lead scoring is now geared entirely towards identifying leads who Sales would most like to talk to.

What is missing here is a critical dimension of your leads: How interested are they in talking to you?

Your prospects are deluged with information. They have virtually infinite sources for researching and identifying solutions. To successfully reach these potential buyers, you need to start by putting your future customers—whether they buy this month, next month, or next year—at the beginning of every strategy and tactic that you pursue.

Chances are, most of your one-dimensional scoring is based on the profile of the lead, although there may be some measures of engagement included as well. Putting the Customer at the Center of Your Lead Scoring lays out a framework for developing a customer-centric lead scoring strategy. It describes how you can incorporate additional dimensions to your lead scoring to assess the engagement of the lead, which is a measure of the lead's interest and willingness to interact with you.

This does not have to be wildly complicated, and the additional dimension can be added without needing to conduct extensive training with your Sales organization. In fact, it can be largely transparent to them. Once base-level scoring is in place, you can add a third dimension to assess your leads' position in the buying cycle.

By isolating these different attributes of the lead, you will have a process that is more testable, more tunable, and more effective. You will have made great strides toward creating a customer-centric organization.

Putting the Customer at the Center of Your Lead Scoring addresses:

How to assess room for improvement in your current lead score
How to determine and weigh the two dimensions of profile and engagement
Illustrations of various lead-scoring scenarios you might encounter
How to build a "lead-qualification machine" that allows you to adjust and test scoring thresholds and criteria
Specific steps for getting started

Putting the Customer at the Center of Your Lead Scoring is available exclusively to Bulldog Community members. If you have a BulldogID, you can use it to register quickly for this document. If you don't have a BulldogID, setup takes just a minute. Go to the document.

Tim Wilson is director of Business Process Analytics at Bulldog Solutions, the lead-generation optimization and management company.

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Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, senior manager of Field Marketing.