Marketing Insights - The Art and Science of Creating Demand

Best practice tells us to ensure alignment between marketing and sales for lead scoring programs.  After all, the sales team is the beneficiary of what marketing implements for lead scoring.  If you have the sales teams’ buy-in, it will make your life as a marketer much easier.

So how can I make sure there is buy-in from sales at the beginning of the process?

One of our customers, Astute Solutions created a lead attribute worksheet they provided their sales team to rank each value to make sure they were part of the process.  They worked with a few key sales people, explained the process and had them complete the worksheet.  Once each had completed with their answers, all the data was aggregated and provided marketing with a definition of what makes a qualified lead to the sales team.

Here are the steps they followed:

• Step 1 – Defined Explicit and Implicit Criteria, for example – Job Function, Webcast Attendee.
• Step 2 – Define Values for each Explicit Criteria, for example – values A – G.
• Step 3 – Choose sales reps to complete the worksheet.  Provide them with the Criteria and Values and ask them to weight each 1-3.  1= Low Value, 2= Moderate Value 3= High Value.
• Step 4 – Aggregate all the sales reps’ answers into one worksheet .  Total the entire score.  The weighted average is the total score divided by how many sales reps involved in the process.  For example Value A for Job Function was 15 Total Score, divided by 5 sales reps = Weighted Average 3.0.
• Step 5 – Based on the Weighted Average, each is High Value, Moderate Value or Low Value.  Now you can use this information to ensure your lead scoring categories and attributes are 100% in alignment with sales’ approach to a qualified lead.

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