Lead Generation

6 Ideas to Consider Prior to Creating Lead Goals for Your Marketing Team

March 2, 2012 by Prashant Kaw • Best Practices, Lead Generation, Marketing Operations • 0 Comment

Whether or not you believe the aphorism, “What Gets Measured Gets Done”, lead volume is an important metric to most businesses. Measuring your lead volume on a consistent basis is critical to hitting business goals such as your Sales targets. A lead volume report is something the executive team expects at the end of the month, or often in the middle of the month if Sales is not on target. However prior to pulling lead volume goals and quotas for your team out of your hat, there are some key things to consider.

6 Ideas to Consider Prior to Creating Lead Volume Goals For your Marketing Team

  1. Track the correct lead volume metric. The particular lead volume metric varies from business to business. Number of raw leads generated may be important to some and to others it is number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). If you have an SLA (service level agreement) with your Sales team that metric may be the number of Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) or Sales Accepted Leads (SALs). Think about the appropriate metric(s) for your business and plan to measure that.
  2. Establish your lead volume goals based on your Sales goals. Work backwards from your Annual revenue goals and use historical deal conversion and lead conversion data to establish your goals. e.g. Say your Annual goal is to hit $5 million revenue and your average deal size is $100K, you need to win 50 deals to hit that goal. If your Opportunity to Win rate is 50% you need 100 opportunities to get to 50 deals and if 50 leads yield an Opportunity, you need 5000 leads (or qualified leads, depending on your business) to hit your Sales targets. This allows you to calculate the number of leads you need to generate every month.
  3. Plan to track your lead volume consistently (i.e. daily). Tracking your lead volume consistently will allow you to control it and provide leads to Sales when they need them most. Hitting the proverbial hockey stick at the end of the month or quarter might make your marketing team look like heroes in theory but will not make you popular with the Sales team. The lead volume needs to be ahead of plan in the early part of the sales cycle so reps are working on raw leads early and at plan towards the end of the Sales cycle when Sales is busy closing out qualified opportunities. Low quality leads at the end of the month or quarter are not helpful and in fact will probably not get follow-up on till they are stale.
  4. Account for Growth.The world is flat, but unfortunately no one likes flat graphs. In the above example we established that your team needs to generate 5000 leads per year or approximately 415 leads per month. In theory you could average that number of leads per month and hit your goals but in reality your executive team wants you do be doing a little better every month. In fact if your Sales team is growing, you need to be doing a lot better every month.
  5. Break down your lead plan by Organic vs. Paid Leads. The reality is marketing is viewed as a cost center. To prove that your are a revenue source the majority of your leads should be inbound or organic. The shorter you are falling on your lead goals, the more money you are spending on PPC, advertising or other paid Channels to make up for that difference. Any goal is obtainable with an unlimited budget but we rarely have that liberty. If you plan and track your leads goals by organic versus paid leads you can manage that a lot better and keep marketing costs down.
  6. Measure recycled, older Leads. Every lead model, plan and goal should have a strategy to recycle older leads since those are sunk costs. What Marketing can achieve en masse via email or social media is atypical of what Sales can or will do. Your lead goals should contain some metrics for bringing older, dormant leads back into the Sales funnel through lead nurturing or recycling campaigns. Often that is taken for granted but it is up to the marketing team to demonstrate the value by tracking it and showing the conversion results to the organization.

How are you establishing lead goals within your marketing organization? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Photo credit: Marttj

What is the Purpose of Lead Scoring?

July 22, 2011 by Prashant Kaw • Lead Generation, Lead Scoring • 2 Comments

Lead scoring is the practice of ranking or rating your leads based on information known about the lead. The lead score is generally calculated using some sort of algorithm based on explicit (demographic) information the lead has provided you such as their role, industry, source, etc. as well as implicit (tracked) information learned about the lead by monitoring their website behavior or interactions with your company’s online content.

A lead score can be a number or a letter grade and the process of calculating it can be simple or complex, but first and foremost we must understand the purpose of scoring leads. Here are a few:

1. Identify the Best Fit for Your Organization

All leads are not created equal. If that were the case, every visitor to your site, every person who shared their information with your company would become a customer. One goal of a lead score is to determine who is most likely to purchase your company’s products.

If your products are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, it is unlikely that a high school student will be on your site looking to engage with your sales team. However a student could be researching some information about your company or your products for a project. Identifying your best potential customers while filtering out your least likely customers is critical to a good lead scoring algorithm.

2. Figure Out Who’s Ready to Buy

Another important aspect of your lead score is figuring out who is ready to buy. Imagine all the leads in your salesforce database are a good fit to buy your products. It is still likely not all of them have budget approval, an immediate need or its the right time. By tracking your leads activity on your site or interactions with your company you could determine who is closer to making a purchase decision and use your lead score to prioritize those leads.

Calling all your leads can be a huge waste of time. A lead who has viewed a product demo, participated in a trial and reviewed your pricing page is probably more likely to buy than someone who simply attended an educational webinar. A lot of smart people just like to keep up with the industry but may not be interested in buying your product. Use the lead score to identify those folks and filter them out.

3. Make Your Sales Team More Productive

An unproductive sales team is a cost center for your organization. Calling all leads is a waste of time, especially if they are not a good fit and not ready to make a decision. The purpose of your lead score should also be to ensure your sales team is talking to the right people at the right time and they are having relevant conversations. More importantly this should happen in the right order so they are calling their best leads first.

4. Use Data to Determine Lead Quality

Famous, American stats professor, W. E. Deming said, “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data.” While gut feel has its value in determining lead quality, it is not consistent and cannot be tracked easily. It is important to use the same criteria with the same weight to identify your best leads and using data is the only way to do that consistently.

5. Do Better Marketing

By using data to track quality, marketers can track which “scores” are culminating customers. With this information they can make intelligent decisions to put emphasis on one program over another and deliver a higher volume of leads that have a better chance of closing. This makes your sales team more productive and also reduces your marketing costs as you need only generate fewer, high quality leads to hit your sales targets.

There are various marketing automation tools available to score your leads such as HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua and Silverpop and you can also use Salesforce.com to do lead scoring. In future posts we will cover aspects of each of these tools and their pros and cons.

How do you use your lead scoring to optimize your sales and marketing efforts? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Photo credit: Ciccio Pizzettaro

3 Simple Ways to Recycle Leads Using Salesforce

July 14, 2011 by Prashant Kaw • Lead Generation, Salesforce.com, Tips • 7 Comments

Lead generation is a costly process, typically the largest expense for marketing departments (if you don’t consider the headcount). Companies can spends hundreds of dollars per lead but very few organizations yield maximum value from their lead generation efforts. Common reasons are lead disqualification based on readiness to buy, lack of follow-up and leads becoming stale (too old or too cold).

Recycling your leads helps get more out of your existing leads and can reduce your dependency on net new leads, dramatically reducing your lead generation costs. Not to be mistaken for lead nurturing, lead recycling is the process of bringing your dead and cold leads back into the sales and marketing pipeline so they can be re-engaged.

Here are 3 simple ways to automate lead recycling using Salesforce.com:

1. Use Lead Queues
Lead queues can help you manage the distribution of your leads. Once a queue owns a lead you could manually, or using assignment rules automatically route leads to your sales reps based on lead activity.

For example, if you have a list of recent tradeshow attendees, you could choose to assign these cold leads to a queue instead of your sales reps since they are not sales ready. Using workflow rules at a later date you can automatically assign warmed up leads that responded to an email campaign to your reps and keep the rest in the queue till the next campaign.

Lead queues also make great owners for low quality leads or disqualified leads which can be brought back into the sales process at a later time.

2. Use Formulas
Formulas are a very powerful feature in salesforce.com and can be used to create a lead score or lead grade based on demographic information, recent lead activity and sales rep feedback. Activity such as campaign responses and website visits can be used to increment the leads score and you can manage lead ownership rules based on the score threshold. For example if you created a formula to score your leads on a scale of 1 to 10, you could choose to send only leads with a score of 6 or higher to your sales team, while the rest remain in a queue till their activity moves them over the score of 5.

3. Use Date Stamps
Date stamps are a great way to monitor the age of a lead. All leads in salesforce get stamped with a created date, but you could also track specific stages of a leads lifecycle using date stamps such as the time it was first opened, or the last time it was modified. Based on your sales goals and processes you could use workflow rules to automatically remove old leads from the sales process, or assign untouched leads to another sales rep or queue till they are woken up by a campaign or activity.

There are a lot more ways you can manage the flow or your leads in salesforce.com or your marketing automation system. What are some techniques you are employing to recycle your leads? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

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