Scoring and Nurturing leads for yourempowered Sales TeamsPublished on August 12, 2016

In the internet age, buyers have too much information to process. The availability ofinformation is also making our prospects smarter, knowledgeable and good in ignoringthe cold sales calls. This change has also shifted the focus to Marketing, more thanever. That doesn't mean sales job is less likely to impact the bottom line. It simplymeans that the Sales need more help from Marketing departments and be on same page.Marketers need process and tools or methodologies to help Sales get more opportunitiesout of leads as every dollar counts in today's competitive landscape.

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Avi KhatriMulti-Solution Marketing Architect

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source: Marketo Blog

Historically, CRM tools used to be sufficient for companies to management theircustomer relationships and 'lead generation' was mere finding and passing names ofpotential buyers to sales. No surprise that many of these leads end up being rejected andabandoned. More worrisome was the sales force who got fatigue and did not trustmarketing for meaningful lead information. Companies in fast pace economy can'tafford to have that mistrust building between key business components : Sales andMarketing.

Jenna Hanington from Pardot captured insightful pain points of clients on her blogCan Marketing Automation Solve Your Pain Points? It's a good read and basic themethat comes out of the blog is that today's customers can't solely rely on just their CRMsystems and expect Marketers to do magic for Sales teams without them being enabledwith a decent Lead Management system.

Today's marketers need a system and processes around lead acquisition, qualifying themin a meaningful way before moving them to nurturing process and eventually to yourCRM for sales teams.

source: Adobe Marketing Cloud documentation

Adobe Campaign, as part of Adobe Marketing Cloud fills that need for a robust andpretty comprehensive lead generation, lead nurturing and lead distribution. LeadGeneration is a separate module within Adobe Campaign. So please check with yourAdobe Consultants on any license terms first.

A typical journey of leads consist of three high level phases:

1. Acquisition - to find new leads

2. Qualification - scoring, rating and routing.

3. Nurturing - to increase your knowledge of customers and prospects to better targettheir expectations and needs.

Acquisition

Within Adobe Campaign, you can start acquisition by creating a seminar registrationpage (landing page). The data can be a contact (customer, prospect, etc.) or any otherinformation which represents a contact's activity and can be contained in a file:subscription to an information service, document download, event attendance,information request via telephone, etc.

Qualification

Activities collected via imports, tracking or landing pages are assigned to a lead basedon building rules. Scoring these leads is important step of understanding and setting upa qualification criteria.These scoring rules can concern their behavior, origin, level ofauthority, etc. Points are added up throughout the nurturing process and are used indesigning Rating rules. e.g. You might have a scoring rule to assign 7 points toparticipants of the Trade show event and 9 points for a person who attended yourseminar. A guy who is attending your seminar is a better lead because he knows theindustry and is researching to learn more about your product.

After setting scoring rules, rating rules let you qualify the value of a lead. Depending onits rating score, the lead will be placed in one of the set categories, e.g. Cold/Warm/Hot,Standard/Silver/Gold, etc. You can create your own custom buckets too.

Adobe Campaign Lead Management Module provides lots of proven template-d ratingrules for lead qualification. Few of them are:

BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe) type rule.

Demographic rule

Marketing event attendance rule

Email tracking rule

Landing page submission rule

List group rule

Routing rules are added to rating rules to define the path of the lead after its ratingchanges. For example, A warm lead can therefore be sent to a nurturing program while ahot lead is forwarded to the CRM/SFA system.

Nurturing

The aim of a nurturing campaign is to set up tools for managing and qualifying leads inorder to increase their value and make their rating easier. The system lets you track theprospect's activity while automatically enriching the data in their profile.

source: Adobe Marketing Cloud documentation

Setting up delivery is also template-d based on your distribution systems and can becustomized.

And you can track the lead across your nurturing cycle:

Retargeting to Re-marketing: AMC way of Predictive Modeling and Propensity Getting personal with Adobe Campaign,

source: Adobe Marketing Cloud documentation

This all looks simple and straightforward and that is the beauty of Adobe Campaign.Any power user should be able to use the system and come up with a sophisticated leadmanagement system. At the same time, the system is pretty extendable and can becustomized by your technology team.

Tagged in: lead management, lead generation, adobe marketing cloud

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