Who are the leads in your database? How ready are they to be sent to your sales team?

Don’t you wish you could have an easy answer to this question? and don’t you wish that every lead you captured through your marketing activities was sales-ready? That would be a marketer’s dream come true, but the trouble with leads is that most of them are not sales ready right away. In the B2B space, it often takes months until a lead is sales-ready. What happens during those months is critical, and can make the difference between turning that lead into a customer, or losing them to a competitor.

If you can manage your database of leads manually without alienating, boring or losing any of them, that’s awesome. But most companies have hundreds or thousands of leads in their database. Keeping track of all these leads manually, keeping them engaged and interested and identifying when they are sales-ready is simply impossible.

Marketing automation offers many great benefits to B2B companies, but one of the best is no doubt the ability to automate lead scoring. Marketing automation system such as eTrigue Professional help you automatically qualify potential leads by scoring each individual prospect based on their engagement with your company, demographic profile, and timing.

Trying to score leads manually can easily end up with cold leads being sent to sales, or – just as bad – with hot leads being ignored. Automated lead scoring helps you stay on top of your leads, nurture them according to their level of readiness and where they are in the buying cycle, and immediately transfer them to your sales team once they have reached a pre-determined threshold that makes them sales-ready. Using a marketing automation system is the best way to make sure you never lose another lead to your competition because of lack of attention.

“Nearly 63 percent of small-business marketers say they can’t track the return on investment of their marketing programs and point to poor feedback from sales regarding the status of leads as a prime culprit, according to a new study by the Sales Lead Management Association,” reports Christopher Hosford, senior reporter BtoB magazine.

The study also notes that marketers are also to blame with 56 percent of respondents stating they do not qualify their leads before sending them to sales; And you wonder why sales doesn’t trust marketing’s judgment?

We have always purported that determining who is real and where they are in the buying process is essential in determining whether or not a prospect is ready for interaction from your sales team. Our recent webinar hosted by Andrew Gaffney, Editor of the DemandGen report, “Real Revenue Gains with Marketing Automation” showed how this plays out in the real world with real companies:

• 2-4x higher Lead Conversion Rates for companies using lead scoring

• 181% higher average close rates from the use of Marketing Automation systems

• Bid-Win ratios 150% higher for organizations that deliver real-time lead alerts to sales

• Sales teams with database filtering tools reported 200% higher average revenue growth in 2008

Automation has helped B2B and B2C companies alike automatically qualify potential leads by scoring each individual prospect based on their engagement with your company, demographic profile and timing. With multiple scoring techniques to choose from, marketing/sales teams can fully understand how each prospect moved to the front of the line. Custom scores based on virtually any single or compound criteria also proved valuable in identifying unique buying behaviors.

And while Marketing Automation vendors , including eTrigue, continue to promote the importance of aligned marketing and sales teams. According to the study, “too many of these types of organizations operate within isolated silos and have not found a way to align the objectives of sales and marketing.”

Please visit the following link to read Hosford’s article:

Study: Small companies can’t track campaign ROI, fail to qualify leads

]]> http://www.etrigue.com/blog/index.php/2009/06/automated-lead-scoring/feed/ 0 http://www.etrigue.com/blog/index.php/2009/02/enterprise-winner-cisco-systems/ http://www.etrigue.com/blog/index.php/2009/02/enterprise-winner-cisco-systems/#comments Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:45:29 +0000 jmeyer http://www.etrigue.com/blog/?p=46

Probably one of the most exciting things to me is seeing someone achieve success with your company’s product. It doesn’t really matter what type of product or even how it’s used. It makes you proud of your team, your partners and of course your customer. Delivering on your promise and seeing measurable results makes anyone feel like a proud papa.

And while we see customer success on a daily basis it is especially rewarding when it is also recognized by others. This week, Cisco Systems was awarded the DemandGen Report’s Sales & Marketing Alignment Award for the Enterprise category. See Story

Linda Fassig-Knauer, Cisco marketing programs manager in the US Theater, credited 3Marketeers and the eTrigue solution for helping Cisco increase appointments with SMB prospects by 25%

“eTrigue Intelligent lead scoring helps us determine which technology or offer the prospect is most interested in discussing with our sales teams and enables us to funnel those leads in a timely manner to our call center, who ultimately sends to our channel partners,” says Fassig-Knauer, “The information in eTrigue lead scoring gives us three times the information so our call center agents are much more prepared before a call. It also greatly increases the number of prospects we can identify as being interested in a solution because the system does not require the customer/prospect to register.”

While the tool is important, kudos obviously go to Linda and her team at Cisco and The 3Marketeers for successfully developing and executing a successful closed demand generation program. And of course, thanks to the folks at the DemandGen Report for recognizing success and the tools that help make things happen!

“The first tool I step on turned into a weapon” –Robert Frost