Do you know what your marketing funnel looks like? People are hitting your website, attending webinars, downloading gated content, and others are being emailed without response. Each of these people might be a potential buyer.
How do you manage which leads are sales-ready and which should remain in the marketing funnel? This blog defines an easy-to-use process to manage the lifecycle of your marketing leads during their journey to becoming won opportunities.
When you think about the lifecycle of a lead, you have to think about lead scoring. Lead scoring is the mechanism that is tuned to your business to identify which leads are sales-ready. Typically, lead scoring is broken out into two parts, behavior scoring and demographic scoring. During the last year, Account Based Marketing (ABM) has become a popular buzzword. This naturally leads to adding a third lifecycle scoring dimension, account scoring.
Demographic Score
A high demographic score tells you the lead is close to your ideal customer persona. It is based on information like job title, industry, company size, and annual revenue. It is critical because it tells you how interested you are in the potential prospect.
Behavior Score
A high behavior score tells you how likely a single customer is to buy your product. It is based on the lead’s activities recorded by your marketing automation platform. Leads who visit your website, attend webinars, and download content are showing high interest. This tells you how interested the lead is in your products.
Account Score
A high account score tells you the propensity of a company to become your customer. This is particularly in important for B2B companies. This score is based on the aggregated activity of all of your leads associated with the given company. Sometimes, a single lead may not do enough to be passed to sales, but five of her colleagues are also engaging your content. This tells you her company is a good customer fit. The account score tells you how likely a company is to buy your product.
Why do you do all of this scoring? You use it to track leads as they progress through your marketing lifecycle. We recommend three stages for your marketing funnel: Suspect, Prospect, and Marketing Qualified (MQL). These stages correspond to certain lead scores and represent leads at different points in their journey.
Marketing Suspect
Anyone who fits your target market. They may be an anonymous lead in your marketing automation platform, or they may have an email address, but no other demographic information or no scored interaction with your marketing content.
Marketing Prospect
A possible future customer. You are starting to understand who they are and they are exhibiting behavior that indicates interest in buying. They have demographic data and are engaging your marketing content.
Marketing Qualified
These leads have demonstrated a strong potential to buy and fit in your target market. They have acted on one of your calls to action and are ready to move into the sales evaluation process.
If you are just getting started with lead scoring, or managing your marketing funnel, this should help you get started. If you already have an established process, we hope this post helps you think about ways to improve your process. ORM Technologies specializes in marketing analytics. If you have questions about your marketing funnel, we would love to help.
Send us a note at info@orm-tech.com.