Lead scoring Q&A with Manticore's VP of Marketing

Lead scoring is being discussed more and more in the world of B2B marketing and demand generation best practices. I've asked Manticore Technology's Vice President of Marketing, Christopher Doran, to shed some light on the topic.

Q: Christopher, a lot of people are talking about lead scoring, but not a lot of people are doing it. What are the benefits of using lead scoring?

A: Lead Scoring is all about identifying leads which are most likely to buy today and sending them over to sales, while those that aren't quite ready stay in the marketing realm for additional nurturing until they're ready to buy.

It's quite the hot topic with B2B marketers right now.

Q: How do you recommend someone gets started with a lead scoring program?

A: There are three steps to getting started with lead scoring.

First is sales and marketing agreeing to a definition of a qualified lead, in effect identifying the point at which a lead from marketing is sent to sales. It's absolutely critical that sales and marketing agree on this definition. Get granular in your definition. Look at characteristics like industry, departments, titles, and willingness to buy, budget, need, and timeline for purchase.

The second step is looking for a lead scoring platform that will allow you to turn the characteristics you've defined into numeric values that will be calculated for leads as they exist in your pipeline.

Third would be indenting the numeric threshold at which a lead is qualified. Leads with scores above this number are owned by sales while leads below are further nurtured by marketing until they are qualified.

Q: What kind of characteristics should I be looking for in a lead scoring platform?

A: When choosing a lead scoring system - I recommend a couple of things. First - look for a system that you can easily modify on the fly. Lead scoring is an art - expect your scoring equation to develop over time. Your solution should easily evolve with you instead of requiring re-deployment with every evolution.

Second - look for a system that offers a free trial of the software. In this SAAS world we live in, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to kick the tires on a system before you buy it.


Q: What if a lead has a low score initially but over time would score differently because you’ve qualified them or they’re finally ready to talk to a sales rep? How do you make sure that the good stuff floats to the surface?

A: Think of lead scores as dynamic creatures that are always rising and falling as more is learned about each lead's level of interest. When configuring your specific lead scoring equation, define what actions leads need to have taken in order to be qualified. Is it downloading a whitepaper? Or downloading a whitepaper, viewing a webinar, and requested a demo?

Your lead scoring system should be tracking these actions to ensure that your hottest leads rise to the top.

Thanks Christopher!

Measure the true impact of your campaigns

Have you ever been frustrated with the fact that the leads and contacts associated with your campaigns aren't always associated with the opportunities that eventually are created? Are you struggling to prove marketing's impact on closed revenue?

Well you're not alone. The ability to demonstrate marketing's impact on business results and return on marketing investment (mROI) is becoming more and more critical to survivial in the corporate jungle. Here's some ammo for potential boardroom warfare...

Although custom report types for salesforce.com were released back in the Summer '07 release, I hadn't had a chance to play around with them until a client asked me how we could see the status of all activities associated with opps whose contacts were members of a campaign. Four joins?!?! OK, I knew this was going to take a little elbow grease.

So in case you haven't heard, custom report types enable you to join various objects in the database together like you've never been able to previously. Go to Setup, Build, Report types, and pick the Primary Object you want to report on, say Opportunities. Then one by one add the additional objects you want to report on as well and where the report type should be housed, and hit Save.

When you click back over to the Reports tab, you'll find under the section you saved the customer report type, e.g. Opportunities, your custom report type! Now you can grab fields from all of the objects that you've joined together.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1) Status & comments of all activities associated with opps whose accounts have contacts who are members of my campaign
2) Opps whose accounts have contacts who are members of my campaign
3) Stage of Opps with Products

Happy Reporting!

All things Salesforce and getting caught up!

Sorry for the lack of postings lately, but things have been pretty hectic since Dreamforce for the Bluebird. Let's get you caught up...

I gave an interview with Marketo's VP of Marketing on the topic of lead management, a topic which I also spoke about at Dreamforce. You can view the presentation that I gave, along with Scott Keane from salesforce.com and Tony Siconolfi from MySpace.

Check out my Vertical Response "woman on the street" interview from Dreamforce below. If I look like I'm about to crack up, it's because there was a member of the hospitality crew staring at me from behind the cameraman and it was really unnerving! It also features local salesforce power users Jason Stewart of DemandBase and Kirk Crenshaw of RevCatalyst.



Last night I attended the SF Bay Area (North) Salesforce.com's User Group event. They gave an update on the Winter '08 Release which includes some killer features. For marketing, they're releasing the long awaited Campaign Hierarchies which enables you to create parent/child relationships for integrated campaigns rolling up campaign stats to the parent. Now most of you savvy power users had created custom fields or look-ups to manage this years ago, but still for newbies it's a great feature.

Next, they've built a sharing model for Marketing, so you can share access to Campaigns across groups. In the past, if your role was Marketing User, you could see everyone's campaigns. Now, you'll be able to make campaigns visible/invisible based on groups. I couldn't imagine why you wouldn't want everyone in your company to have access to your Campaigns pages, but I guess this was a deal breaker for some big Financial Services firms.

There are some other really cool features for sales and marketing alike, but I'll let you read the release guide to find out for yourself.

Kraig Swensrud, Senior Director of Marketing Products at salesforce, talked about Marketing in the Google era and the importance of your website as a lead generator and sales person for your company. A few interesting pointers and factoids about Google AdWords:

• Initial caps in URLs get higher click thru rates (e.g. SalesForceAutomation vs. salesforceautomation). Has to do with readability.


• Calls to action should be specific to what you want them to do - Learn more - Free Trial - Download a whitepaper, rather than simply 'Click here.'


• 4 out of 5 Salesforce for Google Adwords users are pointing their ads to their homepage! This is a major no-no people. Best practice is to send people to dedicated landing pages, which might not be visible on your external site (i.e. you can't navigate to them).

OK, that about does it for me, next up...Campaign reporting. Stay tuned!