Creating Sales Opportunities With Lead Scoring

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The Essential Marketing
Automation Handbook
A How-To Guide for B2B Marketers
Using Lead Scoring
to Create Sales
Opportunities
Mapping Content to
Buying Stage
Optimizing Lead
Nurturing for Pipeline
Acceleration
by Ardath AlbeeThe Essential Marketing Automation Handbook A How-To Guide for B2B Marketers
byArdath Albee
Published by Genius.com Inc.Copyright © 2009, Marketing Interactions, Inc. All rights reserved.
MarketingGenius®RESOURCESIntroduction : i
Content Resource GuideIntroduction
In today's B2B market, where the customer has access to volumes of information sur-rounding their purchase decision, there's been a major shift in the selling paradigm-a shift that all but eliminates "selling" from the process. Now Sales and Marketing profes-sionals must insert themselves into the customer's purchasing process at a much earlier stage, helping the customer buy, through an intelligent, dynamic nurturing cycle.
B2B automated lead nurturing is comprised of three primary components-lead scoring, valuable content and dynamic messaging, all driven by prospects' behavior and profile. In a B2B environment, nurturing programs have one goal in mind-delivering interested, qualified leads to Sales in real time.
This guide will give you the fifteen crucial steps needed to ensuring success in develop-ing effective lead scoring , appropriate, engaging content for each step in the sales cycle and proven techniques for creating and optimizing B2B lead nurturing programs.
MarketingGenius Resources
Copyright © 2009, Marketing Interactions, Inc. All rights reserved.The Essential Marketing Automation Handbook : 1
Creating Sales Opportunities With Lead ScoringChapter 1
Lead scoring is often touted as the new secret sauce that transforms marketing from art to sci-ence. Interestingly, recent research from CSO In-sights finds that only 26.9 percent of 550 com-panies surveyed have implemented a formal lead scoring process. So, why aren't marketers rushing to adopt this new technology-enabled feat?
The answer is often related to the enormity of the concept. Lead scoring is a newer method-ology that's thought hard to grasp because of the complexity and lack of visibility in seeing the big picture across the entire buying (and selling) process. The truth is that the technology that enables lead scoring doesn't eliminate the art of marketing, but enhances it with the addition of science. Lead scoring helps you ensure that no pros-pect gets left behind. But it also helps marketers get closer to their company's markets by providing intelligence they can use to tune their efforts, resulting in increasing evidence of marketing's contribution to the sales pipeline.
MarketingGenius Resources2 : Ardath Albee
If you distill the process of lead scoring to its essence, you find measurement that can be used to enable better sales results. Measurement is a concept marketers are recognizing as an imperative for proving return on investment (ROI). But lead scor-ing's ultimate goal is to help sales sell. The act of applying a score to your leads re-quires that you interpret their behavior. Points are not merely records of marketing achievement-like click throughs, page views or opt-ins-but evidence of the mar-keter's ability to deliver compelling content that engages leads by delivering the right information at the right time. Take that a step farther and you've not only got to en-gage them in the short term, but prove you can build increasing momentum across their buying cycle-and then transition your sales reps into the conversation at just the right moment.
A lead's score is not just a number but a definition of buying interest. The compo-nents of the score should be designed to help marketing pinpoint sales-ready leads by assessing levels of engagement related to their interest in your company's ability to solve urgent priorities.
Often more intimidating is that the sales team's reception and conversion of market-ing-generated leads is the determining factor for success. But that doesn't need to be cause for hesitation in embracing lead scoring. By breaking down the complexity of lead scoring to a 5-stage process, you'll have a framework that helps you structure the process wit... [download for more]