Marketing Roadmaps

Customers

Lead Rating System

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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.

RoundUp: Marketing, Direct Mail and Blogs

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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

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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 🙂

Think of all the things we could discuss: Engaging with Customers

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If we could talk to the animals, learn their languages
Think of all the things we could discuss
If we could walk with the animals, talk with the animals,
Grunt and squeak and squawk with the animals,
And they could squeak and squawk and speak and talk to us.
— Dr. Doolittle, If I Could Talk to the Animals

In a post today at Creating Passionate Users called Users aren’t dangerous, author Kathy Sierra opens with the statement that many firms treat their customers like they have some sort of contagious disease. They do their level best to avoid coming into any contact with them. She’s absolutely right.

I have recently begun to wonder if the reason for this is that on some level many companies are afraid of their customers and what they might say. The image that comes to mind is that customers are like the animals in the zoo — we like to visit them, show that we are interested in them, give lip service to understanding what they need, throw them a few peanuts, and then go home. To actually engage with them — no way, too scary. What if they bite us?

Hence, my citation of Dr. Doolittle, who, if any of you remember the original 1960s film, was pretty much ostracized from polite society for talking to the animals. For trying to understand what they wanted. For seeing another point of view.

It’s time we all started thinking a bit more like Dr. Doolittle and a bit less like the bad guys in the film (and I can’t even remember who they were, but I can still see Rex Harrison singing to a pink conch shell, do not ask me what that means about my psychosocial development). I digress.

The point is: Let’s start talking with our customers, not just talking AT them. Let’s make it easier for our customers to talk with each other.

I think of this as shifting from a model of absolute control to one of controlled, or managed, engagement. IOW I am not proposing that companies open up everything, just what is necessary to allow participation of customers at an appropriate level.

So why DON’T we do this already?

Many companies will swear up and down that their product development teams talk to customers all the time. Conversations, surveys, etc. etc. The reality? Many, if not most, of the communications are designed not to find out what the customers really think, but to validate a decision already made. Some of those decisions are of course right, but sometimes true customer input would dictate a different approach. By then, of course, it is too late. So one reason we are afraid of our customers is they might not agree with us. Ouch. Not a good sign for future health of a business.

Our other fear? We are afraid to let customers speak freely outside of the strictly controlled confines of public relations and prepared case studies. What if they don’t like something, or say something negative, or even just wishy-washy. Well, the bad news is, your customer will find an outlet for his criticism, so isn’t it better that you are the outlet? So you can DO something about it? And funnily enough, it has been my experience that when you invite a customer to the party, even if she is disgruntled about something, the simple act of soliciting the feedback goes part way to improving the situation. Soothing the savage beast, to go back to my animal analogy.

So, how do we get over this fear? As Dr. Doolittle says, I think we just have to talk to the animals. And not just our sales and marketing teams. Product managers, developers, quality assurance, executive management, operations, support, even finance. And we have to take the conversations out of the predictable patterns, to really understand the customer’s business problem or social desire, or whatever it is that prompted them to engage with us in the first place.

This is one of the reasons I am so excited about the potential of blogs for customer engagement. In my opinion, the blog format is more suited to scaleable and active company-customer engagement than any other tool we currently have at our disposal. Nothing can beat a face-to-face conversation or telephone conversation or meaningful one-to-one e-mail exchange. But these are not scaleable, nor do they reach out to many at once. Websites are both scaleable and have reach, but they are static, so it just ain’t a conversation. Blogs combine some of the best attributes of conversations and Websites, and that’s what makes them so suited to "talking to the animals."