by: Jon Miller
As part of our ongoing series about sales and marketing alignment, Paul Dunay of the Buzz Marketing for Technology podcast and I recently chatted about why B2B marketers should care about lead scoring and how they can get started qualifying and prioritizing leads.
Download the full MP3: Sales is from Mars, Marketing is From Venus — Vol II — Lead Scoring.
Podcast Summary:
Lead scoring is the process of determining a prospect’s level of interest in your solution (engagement), as well as your interest in a prospect (demographics targeting). Lead scoring matters because fewer than 25% of web inquiries are sales ready. Since sales reps don't want to waste their time on leads that are not in an active buying cycle, passing these early stage inquiries to sales tends to hurt the relationship between sales and marketing.
Lead scoring matters because there will always be some leads that are truly "hot" so B2B marketers need a way to find the hot leads and pass them to sales before a competitor contacts them or they go cold. At the same time, the majority of inquiries require lead nurturing before they become sales ready, so marketers also need the ability to know when to try to nudge the prospect to the next stage and when to pull back and give the prospect some space.
When used effectively, lead scoring means you will pass fewer, but higher quality, leads to sales. By not wasting sales time on low quality leads, reps can focus on just the high quality leads—meaning wins rates and sales productivity go up. In fact, as little as a 10% increase in lead quality can generate a 40% increase in sales productivity. In a world where the sales department costs 20 or 30% of total revenue, this kind of improvement means a dramatic impact on the bottom line.
Original Post: http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2008/04/sales-is-mars-m.html
Hi,
Your take is interesting and useful, but you talk as if Marketing and Sales were not fully connected and thus talk of Marketing and Sales Executives needing to work together; this is a rather old-fashioned pre-Kotlerian view that sees Sales as primary and Marketing as some sort of ancillary function.
Marketing is the whole management function concerned with finding out what people want and anticipating what they will want in the future. It is then responsible for overseeing that what is produced actually does satisfy the customers needs and wants (want = how the need is fulfilled). Finally it is charged with the task of raising awareness of the product in the market and promoting the benefits of the product, and the benefits of the product over those of competitors.
All promotional efforts should strive to be measurable and Selling is just one of the many parts of the Marketing Communication Mix; which also includes Advertising, Direct Mail, Telesales, Point of Sale, Sales Promotions, Sponsorship, Public Relations, etc.. Face to Face Selling is thus part of Marketing; as it is entirely interactive and allows for adjustment in the approach and message, it is of course the most powerful component of all of the Marketing Communications Mix which forms the fourth 'P' of the overall Marketing Mix. However its use is expensive which is why it tends to be used only for high value products or large quantities of products as in 'B2B'.
A modern company will have a Marketing Director responsible for the whole Marketing function and to whom the Sales Manager reports. The idea that Marketing is something that you only do when you can't sell what you make, with Marketing simply being an aid to selling via Advertising etc. is long obsolete. A successful organization should not have allowed itself to be in the position of having to sell what it makes rather than what customers want!
Mike Cudzich-Madry,
Chartered Marketer and Senior Lecturer in Strategy and Marketing,
Sheffield Hallam University