Your campaigns have been quite successful, with strong engagement rates, and ultimately filled your funnel with leads.
Each week you share these leads that you triumphantly generated, and are overcome with pride when you send the lead update email to sales.
You eagerly await the pat on the back from sales. Crickets.
You prod sales for a status update on your golden leads, still crickets.
Finally, you hear back from sales and it’s the dreaded one-liner, “these leads suck.”
You followed every marketing best practice possible to generate strong leads, what could have gone wrong?
While there are many reasons why a lead could be less than ideal, here are three common issues we see that can all be addressed with—you guessed it—an accurate lead scoring model.
Top 3 reasons sales says your marketing leads suck
1. Leads aren’t ready for sales.
Always a frequent response from sales, yet so vague. How do you identify if a lead is ready for sales? Lead scoring. Assign a value to each contact in your database based on an interaction, touch point, or other engagement. Outline each possible touch point your contacts will encounter in your marketing funnel and then create a corresponding score for each. There you have it—you just developed a lead scoring system.
Be sure to score based on interactions that align with the lifecycle status. For example, a newsletter signup should not have a score near someone who submitted a demo form—these are entirely different types of interest.
Here are a few ideas to get you started.
- Submit a demo request form: 50 points
- Downloaded your latest helpful guide: 15 points
- Conference badge scan: 8 points
- Submit a newsletter signup form: 5 points
2. Lead definition.
My all time favorite. Did your team take the time to define a lead? Now is the time to bring your teams together and define a lead at each stage to level the playing field. At a minimum, your team should discuss and define engaged prospects, leads, MQLs, and SQLs. Once you’re all in agreement on the definitions, use your marketing automation system to assign a lead score based on that lifecycle status. Ensure each lead status correlates to your lead score assignments. The lead scoring model should add up and work behind the scenes.
Here’s an example of lead status within a lead scoring system.
- Lead: 5-30 points
- MQL: 31-60 points
- SQL: 61+ points
3. Lead prioritization.
Another popular response from sales is “I don’t know who to work on. I think company A is more important than company B, so I’ll address them.” Not so fast! We are marketers and know everything can and should be measured. With a lead scoring system, leads are prioritized by level.
Leads at the highest level should be turned over to sales, these would be your SQLs—those folks who have repeatedly engaged with content, visited key web pages, and/or submitted key web forms by dynamically moving down your marketing funnel. Once your lead scoring model is implemented, create list segments to view contacts in each stage and ensure your workflow is only sending the SQLs to your sales team for follow up.
Obviously, models will vary by your organization’s goals. With an accurate system in place, you can now quantifiably measure your contacts and dynamically assign not only their lifecycle status but also their lead score. Sleep better at night now that you have removed the subjective nature of qualifying leads.
What are you waiting for? Set up your lead scoring model and share leads with your sales team with confidence.
No clue where to start with your lead scoring model?
We’ve implemented dozens of lead scoring models across multiple marketing automation systems, bridged the gap between marketing and sales many, many times, created the most complex workflows to make it all work, and know how to make your life easier.
If you need a partner to shoulder all things numbers and lead scoring and have the tough conversations with your team, we’re here to help! Our healthcare marketing agency is equipped to handle these tricky situations and make you the shining marketing rock star.
Let’s talk today.
