Tim wrote a white paper a little before I started working at Bulldog Solutions on multidimensional lead scoring. There’s now a quick videoof him explaining lead scoring as well. One thing that can be challenging is how to specifically take advantage of this approach. In a recent event we applied the principles behind multidimensional lead scoring to try and improve the response rate from a subset of prospects or leads and to get them to talk to our sales folks faster. In the spirit of “eating our own dogfood” I thought I’d share the results.
The Goal
We put on web events or webinars once or twice a month. These are promoted to both existing contacts in our database as well as through promotional channels. As we’ve built up a healthy contact/prospect/lead database one thing we wanted to speed up the process for getting what we consider good leads to start conversations with sales AND limit our communication and not overwhelm the database with yet another annoying e-mail.
The Approach
The first thing was to identify what we considered good leads. For contacts we considered good leads instead of sending a standard invitation to our webinar we sent an e-mail from the persons sales executive at Bulldog Solutions commenting on how we’ve noticed their interest in materials on our site and also gave an option to contact the sales person to discuss their needs.
To identify a “good lead” we selected two dimensions. The first was a profile based lead score, you know title, industry, company size … the usual stuff. The other was an “engagement” score based on the recency and frequency of activity of individuals on our web-site, attending events etc. In case you’re wondering this was collected through a combination of our proprietary registration information and using functionality with Eloqua which we have used internally for 4 years and also implement for clients.
I’m not using exact lead score points here since those vary so let’s say it’s based on a 1000 point scale. To After trying a few different options to see how things would segment we selected a profile score of > 700 for a good lead. But we also wanted to make sure the people we nudged to contact the sales executive were in a “nugable” part of their buying process. For this we established an engagement score based on how many events and resources a contact had accessed on our web-site in the last 3 months. And with some funny math we established an engagement score.
So now we said we want to send this “special invitation” from the sales executive to people with “a profile score > 700 AND and engagement score > 750″ with the hope we’d get a better response from them.
The Results
So first the raw numbers and then my quick analysis:
- Of our list of contacts to invite 4.7% fit into the “good lead” bin. You can tweak this by changing scoring criteria of course but this gave us a reasonable test case and also something we could handle from a sales bandwidth.
- For “good leads” the open rate of the e-mail was 42% for the rest it was 13%
- For “good leads” the registration for the event was 1%, the rest it was 0.5%
- For “good leads” 1% of them (little overlap with registration) asked for sales executive follow-up
So the open rate. Ok that one, not very surprising. These people are already active on our site and events so you’d think they’d be more inclined to open the e-mail and register. What was interesting was:
- Even with making the event a secondary call to action we were able to keep the registration rate up for people getting the more personal e-mail from the sales executive
- We had 1% of people ask for a follow-up so the potential opportunity could be evaluated
The other thing we had as a goal was to reduce the number of e-mails we send people. At one point we sent an e-mail from the sales executive to people as well as the event invitation (at different times in the month). So now we reduced the number of e-mails, kept the registration rate where it needed to be and were able to target the people with the highest potential based on profile and engagement score to engage with our sales executives.
Moving Forward
We’re now doing this for all our events. I love sending out fewer e-mails. Everybody values their inbox and we’re able to now provide the right hand raising opportunity to people based their engagement with us. We will need to keep refining our lead score points and look at better segmenting but overall the approach did work and we were able to evaluate it against our goals. So all this multidimensional lead scoring mumbo jumbo does have some real practical applications. It always pays to find somethign specific that is a need in an organization to implement these concepts instead of trying to fix everythign in one go. Live long and prosper 
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