Lead Scoring and Nurturing in 4 Quick Steps

Automate Lead
Scoring and
Nurturing
in Four Quick Steps

www.pardot.com © 2008 Pardot, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide Automate Lead Scoring and Nurturing in 4 Steps
Executive Summary
Two great truths among B2B marketers are that they are chronically overworked and understaffed. Now more than ever, you are forced to justify your marketing budget and prove the ROI of your lead generation campaigns. This means closely monitoring, qualifying, and nurturing your leads before handing them off to sales, in an effort to maximize close rates. In short, your b2b organization has too many marketing tasks and potentially too few marketing bodies to handle them adequately. Technology does, however, allow you to gain tremendous efficiencies by automating two critical components of your B2B lead generation campaigns: lead scoring and nurturing. The four tactical steps to optimizing your marketing program are as follows: . Scoring leads based on implicit buying signals . Grading leads based on how well they fit your ideal customer profile . Setting up autoresponder and drip marketing emails . Automatically alerting your sales reps when their leads become sales-ready In the four steps that follow, you will see how to maximize your on-going investment in lead generation, facilitate turning your existing "suspects" into prospects, and increase the value of your web marketing.
www.pardot.com | © 2008 Pardot, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide 2 Automate Lead Scoring and Nurturing in 4 Steps
Automate Lead Scoring and Nurturing in 4
Quick Steps
Automated Lead Scoring Quickly and easily determine who your most active leads are. Handing over leads to sales reps without first gaining some intelligence on them can quickly undermine your lead generation program. Without lead scoring and advanced analytics all leads look relatively similar. You might know a few of the company names but generally you have no way to gauge interest levels without contacting the lead. Automatically scoring leads based on their implicit buying signals (i.e. activity on you site or response to your online marketing) provides hard, objective data in an otherwise subjective sales process. At a glance, you can look at the leads you have generated, quickly prioritize them based on score, and assign for follow up those that are mostly likely to become opportunities. You can also ensure that leads that do not pass a certain scoring threshold are put onto a nurturing track before being assigned to sales reps. As these leads begin to respond to nurturing efforts, and their scores increase, they can be automatically assigned for follow up. The following activities are a few examples of behavior that can be scored either negatively or positively: . Form submissions, views, or errors . Page views . File downloads . Email clicks . Site searches
www.pardot.com | © 2008 Pardot, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide 3 Automate Lead Scoring and Nurturing in 4 Steps Grading Leads Based on Explicit Factors Draw a line between the decision makers and the "tire kickers".. Measuring a lead's interest based on implicit buying signals (i.e. online interactions) is only half the battle. What if your most active lead is an intern and has no influence at all on purchase decisions? If you pass leads onto sales without first grading them, your reps may find themselves on a wild goose chase. A marketer must measure explicit qualities before passing leads onto sales or entering them into nurturing tracks to ensure that they fit the organization's ideal customer profile. Typical explicit parameters include company size, industry, job title, department, and other custom factors that shed light on a prospect's profile. You may give a baseline grade of a C and adjust this up or down based on whether explicit factors match or do not match those of your target customer. Imagine you are a company that sells enterprise software to Fortune 500 CTOs. Six leads convert on your site and show equal implicit buying signals based on their behavior. Three are from Fortune 500 companies and three are from smaller organizations. While your prospects may all have the same score of 300, but their grades would be different. Perhaps the Fortune 500 leads would have a grade of A while the other three might all be marked as Ds... [download for more]