For some reason, no matter what I do, I am unable to leave comments on the Marketing Playbook blog. I’ve registered two Typekey accounts, and neither will work. So, to the guys at Marketing Playbook, thanks for mentioning Marketing Roadmaps as a Business Blog you like.
Four excellent posts recently on corporate blogging policies.
From Working Smart, the ongoing evolution of the blogging policy at Thomas Nelson publishers.
From Blog Business World, Corporate blogging guidelines - here to stay
From Diva Marketing, Corporate blogging guidelines and Give Corporate Bloggers a Voice
From my archives, you might also want to check out the second half of Blogging and the online intersection between a job and your private life.
At reader request, here is more detail on lead rating systems. Fair warning: this is a long post.
Before I get into numbers, let’s start with some baseline assumptions:
A prospect is defined as someone who has demonstrated specific interest in your offering, usually by taking some action relative to a marketing program. In other words, they have raised their hand.
In any pool of prospects, roughly 15% are really ready to take action in the near term. We’ll call those sales leads.
Of the balance, about 20% are probably junk, and the other 80% are longer term. Let’s continue to call that longer term group, prospects.
The goal of an integrated sales and marketing program is to:
- Classify the prospects. This is what the lead rating system does.
- Assign the sales leads immediately to sales.
- Develop nurturing programs for prospects to convert them to leads
I have a number of previous posts on this process, here and here and here. Today we’ll focus on the lead rating.
Okay, so how do we classify our prospects?
For just about every product, there are three common questions:
What is the timeframe of purchase?
Does the prospect have a budget?
Does the prospect have purchase authority? (decisionmaker)
These three questions form the basis of a lead rating questionnaire.
In addition to these basic questions, there are additional parameters that help us determine the lead rating. Two important ones are whether the prospect is a present/past customer, and the specific action they took when they indicated interest. Requesting a sales call is usually indicative of greater interest than downloading a brochure. Likewise a returning customer is generally more likely to purchase than a completely new prospect.
Finally, every company will have one or two things that the sales and marketing team believes is absolutely crucial to know for the lead rating. Personally, I have yet to be convinced that to calculate a lead rating, you really need more than the five variables I listed here first, but it is easy enough to accommodate them in my model, so I do J
Step one is to develop the questionnaire that will surface the necessary answers to calculate the rating. For many of you, it will be a web questionnaire, but it could also be completed at a trade show or by a tele-marketing or tele-sales rep.
You will need to map the answers to the lead ranking model. The lead ranking model is a numerical system, with a maximum score of 100. Here is the basic framework. You MUST tailor it to your situation.
Total points: 100
Timeframe: 25
Action: 25
Budget: 20
Authority: 10
Customer: 10
Custom value: 5
Custom value: 5
Timeframe scores: You may adjust your Timeframe ranges based on your sales cycle, but the total value must not exceed 25 points. Here is a place to start.
Immediate: 25
1-3 months: 25
3-6 months: 15
6-12 months: 5
> 12 months: 0
Action scores: You will use your actual “actions” here, but the model is:
The most indicative actions get 25 points.
Mid-range actions get 15 points.
Common actions (download a brochure, trade show booth) get 10 points.
Any time you need to calculate a rating with no action, assign 0 points.
Only one action is counted – there are huge implications to this for automated systems like CRM which go way beyond this post. My opinion: if you can get an initial lead ranking done, you will be light years ahead of most companies J
Budget:
Yes: 20
No: 0
“Don’t know”: 10
Don’t know gets points because a lower level person assigned to do research might not know the budget but other factors may push the opportunity up the scale.
Authority: This is the only additive score, with up to 10 points possible
Research alternatives: 0
Perform technical evaluation: 2
Recommend vendor/product: 2
Approve budget: 3
Approve purchase: 3
You can also make this a binary question, Yes/No With purchase authority equal to 10 points and No equal to 0. It really depends on your product and sales cycle.
Customer: 10 points for past/current customer
Custom values: The custom values are allowed a total of 10 points. You can have two at 5 points each or a single one at 10 points. No matter what you choose, I recommend you select binary yes/no questions. Yes equals all the points, No equals zero. You can also add these points back into one of the other variables.
In the end, what you want is a framework that will help you rate your prospects according to your business.
Step Two:
Use the rating framework to assign a ranking to your prospects. Your mileage may vary, and you should develop test cases to validate the ranges, but here is a starting point:
“A” lead: 76-100 points
“B” lead: 51-75 points
“C” prospect: 30-50 points
“D” prospect: 0-29 points
For example, a top A lead with 100 points: has immediate timeframe, budget, is a past/present customer, has purchase authority, scores high on the Action variable and the 2 custom values. Typically, B leads will score low on one of the high-valued variables, C prospects, low on two of the high-valued variables. This reflects the reality that your best leads are ready to buy right now,with immediate timeframe, budget and authority to buy, and the next best group typically is missing something like budget or has a longer timeframe. And so on.
All the mathematical model does is quantify the reality.
To fine-tune the system to your needs, your sales and marketing team should profile their good leads and prospects against the system to validate the numerical values.
Please DO NOT take this framework as gospel. This is just one way to structure the lead rating framework, and I hope it gives you a good place to start.
Later this week I will have a post about calculating lead ratings, requested by a reader in Korea. I do love the Internet, and the way it lets you virtually meet people from all over the world.
It is a fairly involved topic though, so I probably won’t get to it until the end of the week.
In the meantime, I have a few links that I have been saving up to write about, and just won’t get the time before they are stale. So here they are in list form:
Courtesy Topaz Partners, a link to an article in CMO magazine about marketers embracing the blog form.
A post from Working Smart about Corporate Blogging Rules. Commentary by NevOn on same. I will come back to this topic I am sure 
From AdRants (and others), Forbes article on the top corporate hate sites
From CorporatePR blog (Elizabeth Albrycht): 10 ideas for corporate RSS feeds
UPDATE: from Media Guerilla, a post about Feedster’s public blog policy.
So, today’s big news from MarketingVOX is that RSS gets "poor marks" from marketers. Article cites the BlogAds survey that indicated that use of RSS not as widespread as was assumed.
Personally, I think this whole issue/question/argument (whatever you wish to call it) is just silly. RSS is a tool that you can use to make your content more accessible. If the people you are trying to reach like or prefer RSS, you should use it. End of Story. Right now, that may be a small population, but particularly in tech, it IS a fairly influential population. How does the song go: voices carry…..
I am not influential like a Scoble or a Rubel, but if you want me to read your content regularly, it REALLY helps if you publish an RSS feed. And I know I am not alone.
More importantly, even if those of us who prefer RSS feeds are voices in the wilderness NOW, it won’t be that way forever. Slowly but surely, more and more people will start using RSS for the same reasons we like it now — easier to keep up with the volume of information, easier to keep track of your favorite sites. And so on.
So, my advice to marketers is, learn about RSS, evaluate it as a tool against the audiences you are trying to reach, and be prepared to add it to your marketing toolbox when your audience is ready. It will happen.
After all, remember all those folks in the early 90s who insisted that no one would ever make any money on the Web, and why would a company need a (quizzical look) Web site anyway …..
Where are they now, I wonder
From John Wagner: Marketing agency spoof website — You just have to check it out. BL Ochman also commented on it here.
This week’s links are short items that relate to things I have written about recently.
From Jim Logan, a great post on Paper Direct Mail is Not Dead He provides specific, and excellent, examples on how to integrate direct mail with web marketing for an integrated marketing program. More proof that it isn’t about one marketing tool or another being the magic bullet, it is about using, and combining, all the necessary and available marketing tactics to raise that prospect. Also be sure to read a follow-on post from Brian Carroll that has further recommendations.
From A Consuming Experience: Blogging - and your job This is particularly interesting as this blog is an excellent example of a well-written, interesting, anonymous blog. The author goes into some of the reasons why she has chosen anonymity in this post.
Today’s Getgood Hi-Tech Customer Service Award goes to Six Apart for an amazingly prompt reply to a problem I was having with the TypeKey registration system. I know they have had some system issues in the past few weeks (growing pains I am sure) but I am very glad I chose to use TypePad for my blog. Now all I could wish for was that it wouldn’t let me leave a post in progress without saving it 
That said, I still haven’t been able to leave a comment on the Marketing Playbook blog which is what I was trying to do in the first place — there still seems to be something funky going on. So, I’ll do it here — thanks a bunch for the link out to my post and comments on Marketing Vs. Marketing Communications
And while I am on the topic of The Marketing Playbook, I highly recommend it, even for experienced marketers. It is quite simply the book I wish had been written when I was starting out, so I didn’t have to discover all this stuff by trial and error. Although I did already know a lot of the material, as most senior-level marketers will, it is still an excellent addition to your bookshelf.
The authors put a new spin on some of our old tactics, and the worksheets are super. In fact, I intend to use them in some upcoming client work as they are better than what I used to use.
And for marketers just beginning their careers, this book will really jumpstart your knowledge.
And of course, continue reading Marketing Roadmaps
As the use of blogs as corporate marketing tools expands, it will become crystal clear that the best form for a corporate blog is the collaborative or group blog. And the best collaborative blogs will include BOTH company representatives and customers.
I am currently working with a client to develop a group blog written primarily by customers. I will report more on this project as it progresses.
In the meantime for your reading pleasure:
From Blog Business World: Multi-person group blog: start one
Just a little diversion to tell you all that Kathi Brown, my co-breeder/owner and I were on New England Cable News last Friday night talking dogs with anchor Chet Curtis. If you like dogs, you might get a kick out of it; the video clip is at NECN’s page for the Chet Curtis Report.
