I recently attended the Atlanta Salesforce User Group where Loopfuse was sponsoring and one of my founders, Roy Russo, was speaking. The topic on hand – enhancing your CRM with Loopfuse. One of his first comments was “what makes a lead qualified?” We have several customers who believe all leads that perform any activity on the site should be considered qualified and routed to the CRM and the sales team. And then there are others, present company included, who use lead scoring to determine which leads will be followed up on by sales. By using lead scoring within Loopfuse OneView, you are allowing your prospects to self-qualify themselves based on criteria you set. Loopfuse OneView will then assign each prospect a grade based on their score.
First step, talk to your sales team. Get an understanding of what they are seeing come through the pipeline. Who are the most qualified prospects? Is it webinar attendees? Or is it simply companies based in a specific industry or geography are the hot leads. They are the experts in talking to leads day in and day out and can really give you an idea of how to set up your scoring.
Next, you need to set up your lead scoring rules. OneView allows you to set scores based on the following criteria: pageviews, email opens, email click thrus or prospect information. All giving you a better understanding of how qualified a prospect is to your company. For instance, we find that if someone takes the time to view one of our webinars then they are more likely to be willing to speak to a sales team member. They have shown a high level of interest in our product. So I set up a lead score giving them 1 point for every webinar they view. Additionally, I provide several different links to valuable information for my prospects through email marketing. If they click through on a link, they are once again expressing interest – 2 points. This is the type of information that OneView is gathering and aggregating to give each prospect a grade before being sent to sales.
With several lead scoring rules set up, you want to make it easy to identify the top prospects. No wading aimlessly through the numbers – is the lead qualified or not. I now define a lead grade so that when my sales team is sent leads they can easily understand the value that Loopfuse has given it. Create a score range and give that range a grade name. 5 to 9 points means they have “shown interest.” 26 to 100 points means this is a “Hot” lead – follow up immediately.
You can then finalize the process by delivering this information into your sales team’s most trusted sidekick – Salesforce.com. Use our LoopFuse OneView salesforce.com plug-in (available on appexchange) and all the lead scoring and grading will be populated into the lead view. Your sales team can easily see their hottest prospects come through the pipeline and follow up on them based on lead grades.
This type of pre-qualifying activity will give your sales team greater confidence in the marketing team and the leads that come into Salesforce.com. The marketing team can get a better idea of what type of lead is ranking high and therefore turn their attention to those types of prospects and programs. Lead Scoring makes marketing valuable to sales!
Until next time…
Tags: Atlanta Salesforce User Group, Produce Qualified Leads, Salesforce.com Integration
