Optimise your marketing pipeline

Managing your marketing pipeline effectively can impact business results and help align sales and marketing. Ellen Valentine, evangelist at Silverpop, offers three areas of improvement

It’s easy to let a marketing pipeline fall into disrepair as incoming leads take precedence over slow-burning opportunities, which can slip and stagnate for a variety of reasons. Implementing effective scoring and routing systems allow you to improve the quality of leads you’re providing to sales and increase the relevancy of information you’re providing to your contacts.

To help you achieve this, here are some top tips broken down into three areas: foundational principles, recommended practices and best practices.

1. Foundational principles

Where possible, involve sales and other key stakeholders. One of the main purposes of a lead scoring and routing initiative is to hand off or integrate sales or other channels outside the marketing department. To ensure valuable leads aren’t lost, it’s vital marketing and sales (and/or other interested parties) work together to define the criteria by which an inquiry becomes qualified enough for routing to someone outside the marketing department. It’s also important to document when and how leads are routed back to marketing if the company or contact is in fact not yet ready to engage with sales.

However, marketers can gain tremendous insights and leverage scoring even if the scores aren’t shared with sales. You can leverage the score or rank to target specific content offers or place individuals in nurture programmes based on their buying stage.

Design with change in mind: lead scoring and routing implementations need to be flexible. It should be easy to adjust routing rules and alerts based on a changing sales organisation. Additional behavioural-based rules should be added on the submittal of information on a new web page, landing form or other behaviour.

2. Recommended practices

Determine the importance of what visitors tell you versus what they do; and then weight your scoring model accordingly. High-traffic sites with broad reach typically require at least an even balance of demographic and behavioural scoring methods, but you might put more weight on demographic attributes to avoid the high volume of casual site visitors who are only there for free content. Niche sites with lower traffic volumes can place more emphasis on behaviours and use demographic data to disqualify those that should never be leads, such as interns, students, competitors or residents of untargeted geographies.

Develop different content for different points in the buying cycle. Recognise not all site visitors and email recipients are at the same point in the cycle. To increase relevancy, engagement and progress, develop content and offers that have the buying cycle in mind. To help you achieve success in this area, develop buyer personas and document the customary buying cycle steps in order to increase the effectiveness of your content and offers.

One of the best indicators of someone’s propensity to purchase is behaviour. These behaviours can include submitting a form, visiting a web page, or clicking on a link in an email. Consider assigning points in your lead scoring model if someone performs any of these steps. In addition, allow ‘hand raisers’ (site visitors who request to speak with sales) to bypass the scoring model and be routed directly to a rep.

3. Best practices

Have specific, documented processes for lead recycling. If a lead is routed to sales, and sales determines it’s not yet a qualified opportunity, put a mechanism in place to recycle this contact back into your marketing efforts. Also, debrief with sales to determine why the lead wasn’t qualified.

Because lead routing and recycling is such a dynamic process, routing with emails alone isn’t recommended. Routing works best when it takes place between your marketing automation and your integrated CRM system. That way sales-ready leads will automatically show up in the same system the sales reps use for the daily management of their sales process. Email alerts delivered from the marketing automation system to the rep is a good supplement to a CRM-based routing process.

Make it obvious to salespeople when they should act. Leverage views, tasks and work flows in CRM to make it clear to sales reps when they should follow up with a lead who’s taken a meaningful action. Provide the date of the marketing alert and an introductory note so reps get suggestions on appropriate steps they should take in following up.

Use negative scoring to eliminate certain contacts from being qualified. Every company has individuals that are interested in your company but will never become a valid potential buyer of your offerings. A better practice is to have individuals from certain website URLs or geographies omitted from your lead nurturing, recycling, scoring and routing processes.

Develop a system for identifying and routing the hottest leads. A new lead for you might be your competitor’s hot lead who’s researching other vendors. Provide clear ways for these ‘blue birds’ to raise their hand and get an immediate call from sales.

Lead scoring and routing presents an outstanding opportunity for sales and marketing to come together and define how the business will be managed. Take time to document your processes and criteria and you’ll be certain to improve the flow of leads and, in due time, business results for your company.

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