The CMO Council recently published a report entitled “Closing the Gap: The Sales and Marketing Alignment Imperative.” Among other key findings, the study revealed that “…there is an urgent need for marketing, sales, and channel management to align and embrace technologies, processes, and programs that enable wider and deeper customer conversations, as well as leverage the knowledge, influence, and access of the channel and continuously refine the delivery of products and services in the most painless, seamless, and satisfying way.”
Although that’s definitely more than a mouthful, the points made are important ones and likely resonate with most marketers.
In this week’s #B2BChat, we will share ideas and thoughts on sales and marketing alignment. We will be joined by three of the leading sales and marketing alignment experts, Rod Sloane (@RodSloane), Ardath Albee (@Ardath421), and John Cousineau (@JCousineau).
Some questions we will pose to help guide the conversation include:
- Why is sales and marketing alignment difficult for most organizations?
- Who should take the lead in the alignment process—marketing or sales?
- What are marketing’s main complaints about sales?
- What are sales’ main complaints about marketing?
- What role do leads play in the effort to align marketing and sales?
- Does automated lead management help or hinder sales and marketing alignment?
- Should the marketing and sales teams share common goals and compensation plans?
- How do you measure sales and marketing alignment?
- How can sales and marketing alignment impact the bottom line?
Join us for this week’s #B2Bchat on sales and marketing alignment on Thursday, April 15 at 8:00 p.m. Eastern (5:00 p.m. Pacific). Follow @B2B_chat for updates.
About the B2Bblogger: Kent Huffman is the CMO at BearCom Wireless, America’s only nationwide wireless equipment dealer and integrator. Kent is the Co-Publisher of a new digital publication for marketers,
Social Media Marketing Magazine. He is a published author and has been featured in Forbes, Marketing News, BtoB, Computerworld, and Texas Technology magazines. Kent also serves in advisory roles for the CMO Council, MetricsBoard, and Social2B. You can follow him on Twitter at @KentHuffman.
Lead scoring can be a very complex process, consider this article an introduction to some of the basic concepts of lead scoring, and how it is used to manage your prospective customers as they move through the funnel and their level of interest in the solutions to their problems that your company provides changes.
The main objective of lead scoring is to rank prospective customers numerically based on their level of interest in order to empower the sales department with better actionable information about theprospective customers they are, or plan to engage with.
1. What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is a process that enables sales to identify more sales ready leads faster. It’s a qualification process of assigning a numeric value (or score) to leads to qualify or rank them according to their level of interest. Lead scoring allows sales to quickly identify promising prospects by simply checking their lead score.
2. What do I need before I start lead scoring?
It’s important that you have a universal “lead” definition that both Sales and Marketing agree on. There’s no sense in Marketing scoring leads to identify quality, if Marketing and Sales aren’t on the same page about what “quality” actually means.
3. Why should I score leads?
Assuming leads move through the funnel step-by-step, or even if they don’t you want to be able to track and adjust their lead quality as their behavior or interactions with your website and other content changes over time. With lead scoring, each action a lead takes can be counted differently, and ultimately add or subtract from their lead quality score, making them more or less promising as a prospect.
For example, when a prospect clicks through from a tweet to your blog do you want to assign them the same weight as a prospect that signs up for a recent webinar? Maybe do, maybe you don’t but either way, lead scoring will keep track of this behavior and keep score automatically.
4. What should I know?
Lead scoring is comprised of two parts: “explicit” and “implicit” information. While both types of data are equally important, implicit data tends to be more telling and thus may be worth more to the lead scorer. Explicit data is more of the “fit” of the prospect to your product, including attributes like; company, size, industry segment, job title, location, budget, authority and timing.
Implicit data on the other had is evident in the prospects digital body language; specific web pages visited, number of pages, recency of response, email activity, social media activity, or downloads of resources such as white papers or webinars.
5. What’s process like?
As each lead takes an action, their score changes (score will also change if lead is inactive). Marketing Automation can help here because it enables automatic re-scoring triggered by every action the prospect takes (that you’ve assigned a score to) otherwise you would have to do this manually.
For example, if A, B, or C defines “fit” with your buyer personas and 1, 2, 3, or 4 defines “engagement“, or digital body language, a combined score of A1 would be a prospect that has an ideal fit, and a maximum level of engagement. A prospect with a score of A4 might be the right fit, but has minimum engagement, and would be a good opportunity to funnel into a nurturing program until they have a higher engagement score. Prospects with scores more like C1 or D1 show very high engagement, but very low fit, this may be a prospect that is researching for a more senior decision maker, and worth your while to follow up with.
In the end, lead scoring can be highly effective at delivering sales with better qualified leads, but remember, if Marketing and Sales have not agreed on a “universal lead definition” true success is at risk. This process is highly effective when both Sales and Marketing have worked together to develop the definition of a qualified lead. So your first step is to start there. Find your sales counterpart, reach agreement, write it down, and begin your lead scoring project.
So those are the basics, if you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments.
About The B2Bblogger: Barbra Gago (
@barbragago) is the Inbound & Social Marketing Manager for
Genius.com. She has done web consulting, event planning, and fashion design, but her driving force is marketing through new media and how the evolution of technology affects the way we communicate. At Genius.com she works relentlessly to craft successful inbound strategies, support and build the
Connected Marketer community, and write passionately about the things she learns.
