Marketing Insights

Your ability to gauge the health and activity level of your contact database is the basis for accurately measuring engagement levels, positively impacting deliverability scores, and effectively projecting campaign response rates. In addition, data quality drives better segmentation, better targeting, better personalization, and of course, more accurate lead scoring. In this 2 minute video Paul Teshima, Eloqua EVP of Customer Strategy and Success, talks about why an organization can increase their lead generation by over 250% when a data quality program is present.

Click to watch now!

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In our series about declining email response rates, so far we’ve looked at:

• Cleaning out inactive contacts
• Online reputation measurement
• Follow-up timing

Today we’re going to talk about purchased list. (Hint: Bad Idea!)

Are you buying email lists from other sources and adding those folks into your database? Don’t. I mean it: stop right now. First of all, the success rate on purchased email lists is approximately .001% according to my in-depth research, not to mention that you’re killing your online reputation. If you’ve purchased lists in the past I encourage you to be ruthless and cull those people from your database. Right now. Go.

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If your company sells through resellers or a channel, then your process might look something like this:

1. You work hard to bring in high quality leads
2. Your qualification team checks on the leads and sends the best ones on to your resellers
3. A large black hole engulfs the rest of the data in the sales cycle

There are many advantages to selling through channel partners, but one of the biggest downsides for a marketer is the lack of visibility. In order to know which marketing programs to continue, which trade shows to attend, which AdWords to buy, etc. you need to know which leads are resulting in closed deals. Many people have tried to solve this problem (and they’re still trying!), so I’m not going to tackle that black hole.

What I can tackle is a quick check-up on your partners so that you can measure who’s following-through with the leads that you’re sending to them. Here’s how it works:

Approximately a week after your inside team has qualified a lead and sent it to a partner, send a follow-up email to the lead asking them a simple question: “Did our partner get you the information that you needed?” Make it simple for them to respond by offering two links in the email: “Yes, I have what I need” or “No, I’m still waiting on information.”

Ideally, you’re going to want to use a marketing automation system to do this so that you can take it one step farther: a week after sending that email you can check to see who did not respond in any way and send them a second/final email asking again. Now you have three groups of leads: those who haven’t replied, those who are happy, and those who haven’t heard from their assigned partner.

It’s that final group that you’ll want to keep an eye on. It’s time to give them a little attention again from your inside team, then assign them to another partner and get the ball rolling. If you start to see trends in this group – are the same partners failing again and again? – you’ll need to dole out warnings and perhaps even take away partner privileges… I’ll leave that up to you and your organization. On the other side of that coin, keep tabs on the happy group too and consider rewarding (or at least thanking) the high-performing partners.

I’d love to hear from you – have you tried anything like this? What kind of results have you experienced?

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Most clients start out with a lead bucket and an opportunity bucket.  Marketing works with leads, sales works with opportunities.  However, as you move toward an integrated marketing funnel, it is important to incorporate additional lead stages in the buying cycle. 

A Lead Stage field buckets leads and opportunities into a category to help marketers understand how effective their programs are based on conversion from one stage to another.  It also helps with understanding which group I can include or exclude in a marketing program, based on where they are in the buying cycle. 

Here are the Lead Stage fields we recommend and a description for each:

• Suspect  = list purchase, unknown web visitors, pre-show registration lists, raw names
• Inquiry = prospect raised their hand, responds to a campaign
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)  = meets marketing qualification criteria —- Note: In order to prioritize which MQLs should go to sales, Lead Scoring can be incorporated.  For instance you might  have one MQL with a Lead Rating of A1 and one with a B2.  Both are marketing qualified, but based on Lead Score / Rating they will go to sales as priority or non-priority for follow-up.
• Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) = sales determines the lead meets their acceptance criteria, this lead  is not yet in an active pipeline
• Sales Rejected / Recycled Lead (SRL) = sales determines the leads is not sales ready and recycles this lead back to marketing —- Note: Some organizations opt to have sales change the Lead Status field back to MQL. However, in order to get better reporting and have a dialogue with sales, it might be easier to incorporate this additional Lead Status.
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) = meets specific sales stages and sales converts to Opportunity and adds to their pipeline. —- Note: Typically sales uses sales stages during SQL (e.g. proposal, pricing, negotiation, pending signatures, etc.), usually following a sales methodology.  Marketing can choose to add these to their funnel and report based o the stages as well.
• Customer = purchase 

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