Who's Joe Blow, Anyway? And How Do You Know if He's on Your Web Site?

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December 2009, Issue 70

Marketing Evolution
Who's Joe Blow, Anyway? And How Do You Know if He's on Your Web Site?
Q&A from Evolving the Lead Score Beyond Basic Data, originally presented December 8, 2009.

In a live Online Marketing Institute Webinar last week, experts from marketing automation leader Eloqua and Bulldog Solutions discussed the nuts and bolts of multidimensional lead scoring, including answering audience questions on how to track prospects’ activity on your Web site in order to factor it into lead scoring.

Read the Q&A with three additional questions not answered during the live event.

On-demand Webinar: Evolving the Lead Score Beyond Basic Data

Explicit information about your prospects is important, but it isn't everything—the missing component is behavior.

In this on-demand Webinar, experts from Bulldog Solutions and Eloqua define the building blocks and review a case study of multidimensional lead scoring that takes both explicit and implicit information into account.

View at your convenience.

Question:

Mike Angiletta, President, Online Marketing Connect (Moderator): We have a couple of questions related to Chris' "Joe Blow Case Study." The first question is: How did you get that initial information on Joe Blow? And how do you know when he's on your Web site, for example?

Response:

Chris Petko, Director, Marketing Operations, Eloqua: First of all, Eloqua, the product, does have a Web tracking piece to it. So we can track online behavior whether Joe's on our Web site or dot-com page, whether he's on one of our campaign pages, or whether he's submitting a form or clicking through an e-mail we send out through Eloqua, the product. That's how we acquire that implicit information, which is his behavior.

The second part of the question is: How do we come up with what that looks like in terms of how much of a score we should give him? If you remember one of my first slides, one of the first matrices was Profile and Level of Engagement. We played around a lot with those matrices, and how we came up with how many points they should get and when they should be getting them was based on historical data we pulled from our system and then analyzed.

And then also, we came up with that matrix by extensive conversations we had with multiple people in Marketing and Sales. And that gave us a good baseline for what a good lead looks like to us. Is it someone who's viewed everything on our Web site? Is it someone who's seen a few things on our Web site but who's been very active in a certain time period? And then over time, and it's only been three months, we've made multiple revisions to that matrix. And we will continue to revise it in the future.

Question:
Mike Angiletta: Going even further with the Joe Case Study and this example: When Joe Blow makes a purchase, and chances are, since this is a BtoB environment, it might not be an immediate e-commerce transaction—we might be talking about interfacing with accounting software: How do you take into account that Joe Blow has made a purchase or a payment; do you somehow incorporate that into your lead scoring process and system?

Responses:
Chris Petko: Because Eloqua is in the BtoB space, the fact that Joe Blow made a purchase means he would no longer be a lead for us. He'd be much further qualified down the funnel; he may be a closed opportunity for us. So generally we would not send clients, or someone who has already purchased from us, through lead scoring again, just based on our business process.

That's a really good point though, because lead scoring methodology and matrices are not one-size-fits-all. You have to really develop them based on what your business process is.

In fact, many business experts say to develop the process first, because the technology can then be applied to it. And that's what we've done. So in the event that Joe Blow buys something from us and he's in the lead scoring program, he typically would get removed from lead scoring.

That being said, we would have the data collected on the back end in our log files that would show us that Joe Blow has become a client and also show us a historical record of what his scores were through the process. We would then use that to enhance and revise our matrix.

Rob Solomon, CEO, Bulldog Solutions: And keep in mind that all of the data lives inside CRM. So when your Sales Guy is looking at who is coming up for renewal or for upsell/cross-sell opportunities, all of that critical data is captured, i.e., "Where was Joe and what was he doing?"

Question:
Mike Angiletta: In terms of degrading a score, would you suggest it's a best practice to zero out a person's score and then rescore that person, or adjust the person's current score?

Responses:
Rob Solomon: No, I would not suggest zeroing out a score. Remember, there are two elements to a score: Engagement and Fit. So here we're talking about engagement. To the extent that someone has played with you before, there's clearly a level of interest. We don't view it as a best practice to go from A1 (best) to A4 (not so good); we think it's a slow gradual with some baseline.

Steve Woods, CTO, Eloqua: I think your scoring algorithm needs to be one that is not subject to how it's implemented. If an activity happened five days ago, and the person gets put into the scoring algorithm, then that five-day-ago activity should be interesting but degraded slightly. So whether you implement that at a technical level and set it to zero and build a score from the ground up, or take what it was yesterday and reduce it by 10 points—it doesn't really matter.

To agree with Rob's point, the score is dependent on the aggregate view of all your activities, so it's not like you only score a lead when there is an interaction, and then zero it out at that point and build the score up. Rather, you're continually scoring or degrading the score over time.

Question:
Mike Angiletta: Is it possible to create lead scores, not just on an individual level, but also on an account level; in other words, create a lead score that accumulates the activity of several people on one account?

Responses:
Steve Woods: Absolutely. At the end of the day, most organizations are selling to organizations, where there are individuals running the buying decisions. So looking from the perspective of who else is involved can be very interesting. It becomes a little bit more nuanced when you attempt to do it, because how do you account for the difference in large organizations where you might see 20, 40, or 50 people involved, versus a smaller organization where there would only ever be two or three people involved in a buying decision? You need a little more thinking involved even than in the scoring against an individual.

But yes, being able to look at the overall activity of an account, and apply scoring to the activity of that account, is definitely one of the key goals.

Chris Petko: When we look at our lead scoring process here, the main goal is to identify and prioritize leads coming through the funnel. So once that happens, we do aggregate scores in our CRM as more of an interest thing for our sales team.

But once we've identified those leads, and hopefully they get further down in the funnel, what we would start looking at is something we call "opportunity scoring." So once a first connection has been made with that individual at that company, then we start scoring them based on who they are and how many people are now getting added to the program, and how the account itself is being active through the funnel.

Three Bonus Questions Not Answered During the Live Event

Question:
In our lead scoring system, I found that timing to read the lead was very important. If someone on the sales team does not read the assigned lead within 24 hours, we re-routed it to the manager. How do you handle leads that are held too long?

Response:
Rob Solomon: In the presentation, I referred to an SLA, or service-level agreement, between Sales and Marketing. I really recommend this. Among other things, this spells out the expected action Sales will take for each lead. In our organization, for example, Sales is expected within 48 hours to follow up on "pre-MQL" leads; that is, leads that show the kind of explicit and behavioral scores that make them likely to turn into Marketing Qualified Leads. If they don't, our director of sales operations, who sees a daily report, can connect with them to find out why not. It's similar to what you are describing, letting a manager know that a lead needs following. Some level of checks and balances like this helps ensure those leads don’t slip through the cracks.

Question:
What lead scoring techniques can you still use with anonymous Web users?

Response:
Steve Woods: We currently don't score anonymous leads, as we would not consider them to be qualified enough. That being said, it is valuable to score anonymous Web visitors who are part of an open opportunity. This could be accomplished by looking at the company by IP information.

Question:
Would you recommend assigning higher scoring leads to top-performing sales reps?

Response:
Steve Woods: Yes, for qualification. The field will typically leverage their local networking and proximity to the prospect to help close the deal. In this case, it would not make sense to route by score. However, it does make sense to penalize reps for not converting, or responding to qualified leads within a specific timeframe.

Question:
Mike Angiletta: How do you know which variables get the high score versus the low score? Is there math, statistics, historical data behind it? And how do you know which variables are predicting purchase? Are there any general rules of thumb?

Response:
Steve Woods: It's difficult to apply a rule of thumb. You've got to apply a little bit of math and a little bit of intuition to it. Start with the intuition and then verify that with the mathematics. We've seen the iterative process that needs to happen here. Folks like Company X, with whom we've worked for a number of years, and they've amassed a very good amount of data—they've been able to apply statistics on top of that so that they can understand the propensity of a buyer—based on any of those variables—to actually turn into a selling appointment.

But that depends on the volume of flow you have in your sales process and the history you have acquiring that data. So you really start out with intuition tested with mathematics and then, over time, you can apply some additional mathematics to it.

There's no easy rule of thumb about "This activity is going to mean this in this buying process." There are areas you can look at that give you incredible insight. For example, I think the search query that someone uses to find your Web site is the most underappreciated lead scoring tool that we've seen. There's a ton of insight into who they are as a buyer based on that, and then obviously if they fill out a longer registration form or attend a one-hour event, those are usually higher qualification levels.

Question:
Mike Angiletta: How do you quantify the benefits of a system like this for C-level execs? More intelligent marketing and sales spend, more conversions to sales (in other words, increased revenue), targeted marketing? And how do you quote actual percentages in increases in cost savings? How do you sell this to the C level?

Response:
Steve Woods: At the highest level, it's revenue generated per dollars spent in the sales and marketing ecosystem in its entirety. That's really where your true efficiencies come out. If you look beneath that lens, you're looking at the efficiencies of each of the conversion rates: How many of our inquiries are turning into Marketing Qualified Leads? How many of those Marketing Qualified Leads are turning into opportunities? How many of those opportunities are progressing through the sales pipeline? Then, as you run that back up the funnel, where were the leads that made it down the funnel originally sourced?

So as you begin to move the levers in this way, you might reallocate budget from big outbound campaigns like a television spot to a demand-generation campaign like a Webinar. You might move a field sales team into an inside sales team or vice versa. You might reallocate budget from inside sales to content development and Marketing.

Once you understand what the conversion rates and numbers and speeds are, you can reallocate based on those metrics and really drive down the dollars spent on revenue acquisition versus dollars of revenue acquired.

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Original Q&A has been edited for clarity and consolidation.

Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, director of Field Marketing.