By Jep Castelein, Lead Sloth, via Genius.com

This is episode 3 of the 4 steps to successful lead management: how to nurture and score leads. These are all 4 steps:

1. Getting more visitors to your website
2. Get more visitors to register
3. Lead nurturing and scoring (this post)
4. Marketing & Sales Collaboration

The goal of step 1 and step 2 was to add as many quality leads to your database as possible. You may have other leads in the same database, so the quality of the leads is probably variable. The goal of lead nurturing and scoring is to start a conversation with these leads to figure out which ones are most valuable. Those should be passed on to the sales team for follow-up (which is step 4).

Lead Scoring

How do you know which lead is interesting, and which one is not? Lead Scoring is the process of assigning a numeric quality score to the lead. The score is based on two things:

1. Static data, such as job title
2. Behavior, such as a website visit

The score can be increased based on specific data or behavior, but the score can also go down. For example, let’s assume the ideal prospect for a security product is “Chief Security Officer”. So that particular title adds 50 points, but “student” would subtract 50 points. These numbers are relative and are usually refined by getting feedback from the sales team: they can tell whether a prospect with a high score is indeed a hot lead. If not, you may have to adjust the weight of the scoring criteria.

Data Quality

Data quality may be a less exciting topic, but it’s no less important. If you want to find out which leads are high-quality you need accurate data. You need to avoid duplicates: let’s assume you have two profiles on the same person. That would mean that activities like website visits or downloads could be linked to only one of the profiles. You may also miss particular information such as Job Title. With low data quality you get an incomplete picture, and you may miss an opportunity because the prospect seems to have a low Lead Score.

There are specific tools and strategies for removing duplicates from your data, as well as tools to avoid creating duplicates. Also, various vendors provide data cleaning services to check mailing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and job titles. One example is Jigsaw, which just launched a new cleaning service called Data Fusion. You could also check out NetProspex and InsideView.

In addition to data quality, you also want to store as much information about prospect as possible: what topics are they interested in, how did they find out about your company, how often did they visit your website, and so on. This allows you to personalize the lead nurturing in the next step.

Lead Nurturing

After setting up Lead Scoring and a data hygiene process, start a dialog with your leads. The traditional way of doing this is to send a monthly email newsletter. With lead nurturing you can go one step further: you can segment your audience and enter them into different email nurturing tracks based on their interests. Prospects will receive several emails that link to information that is relevant for them specifically. This is also called drip marketing. It is labor intensive to do this manually, so there are systems that help you with this (for instance Genius Enterprise).

Find the Good Leads

So with a combination of a clean database, lead scoring and lead nurturing you are able to identify the leads that are most promising. Usually, it takes a couple of months to fine-tune your nurturing and scoring processes. One of the key success factors is collaboration with the sales team: they need to start trusting the lead scoring system, so it’s good to closely involve them in the optimization process.

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. In future posts I will go into more detail, so please tell what you want to hear about!