B2B Lead Development

The method in which a prospect becomes a lead can feel like a mystery at times. Even if you’re tracking your lead generation metrics, it’s still somewhat daunting. By the time you’ve nailed down what trends are working, everything changes and you feel like you’re back at square one again. All of this stress can be handled with a lead nurture and scoring process. In doing so, you limit the amount of time needed to track lead conversions, finding trends, and balancing messaging. These tactics will help you get started in creating a strong lead management process. Marketing Automation and Lead ID The absolute first thing you need to do in order to start building a lead nurture and scoring strategy is to get a marketing automation platform onboarded. There are tons out there, all with various use-cases and implementations. However, simply buying a marketing automation software doesn’t enable you to start automating marketing. Once the system is set up, you’ll need to start thinking about building out your contact database. Think about your ideal customer profile- who is the main buyer/ decision maker? Also, who does that decision maker surround themselves with to create a buyer committee? Once you answer these questions, you can segment each part of the marketing database with job functions, industries, company sizes, geographies, etc. Email Nurture Tracks Now that you have your segmentation in your automation platform, it’s time to start building out various email cadences and nurture tracks. Why would you need more than one? Well, there is more than one part of the marketing funnel, just like there’s more than one type of buyer. You’ll need to address each one of these. The best way to go about this is to think of questions you can answer for your buyers. What is the pain point that each of your solutions cover? Gather up/ create relative content that will promote you as a thought leader, and integrate that into your nurture. Ideally, you’ll have multiple nurture tracks for each type of buyer, use-case, segment, and position in the marketing funnel. These should be somewhat malleable as you’ll need to change messaging to fit certain trends. Lead Scoring Is your Marketing automation set up and the email cadences created? Now you’ll need to work on scoring your leads. This is typically where marketers get the most confused, and it’s understandable as there are about a thousand lead scoring methods out there. The most important thing to remember while creating a scoring process is that all leads are not equal. Just because one converted after downloading two whitepapers, doesn’t mean that’ll happen for the next one. So, what is lead scoring? It’s method in which a lead is given a score (typically 0-100, but can be whatever you want) based on engagement levels with marketing materials. Your scoring will be based on two things: how much content you have, and what type of content you have. For example, if a prospect downloads a whitepaper, and clicks on a blog link, they’re more than likely still sitting at the top-middle of the funnel. However, if they would have downloaded a whitepaper, and a product sheet, you’re looking at a bottom of funnel lead- which would score higher. Here’s an easy to follow example template of a lead scoring model: Interactions:Contact Us Form Fill-Content Form Fill-Blog Interaction-Event Attendance-Web visit- Case Studies-Web visit- Infographics-Web visit- Whitepapers-Web visit- Ebooks-Multiple Web Visits-Targeting Criteria:Job title-Job function-Geography-Industry-Employee Size-Negative Score:Unsubscribe-No Engagement-Disqualified-MQL __________Lastly, and the most important thing to remember when nurturing and scoring leads, is to be flexible. What you’re doing right now may not work in the future, and that’s okay. You’re work now is what will produce results later down the line, so the more you’re willing to test and work on, the better off you’ll be. Lead generation is one of the least consistent parts of marketing, however you can take control with a solid process. Learn more about how you can utilize data and lead scoring here

About PureB2B

Meet the PureB2B Team

Step up your career with us

B2B Lead Development

Marketing Lead Nurture and Scoring 101 [Free template]

Where Most B2B Companies Miss with Sales Development

The Anatomy of a Perfectly Crafted Sales Prospecting Email