Page 116 - The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million - PDFDrive.com

telecom industry. These are beautiful leads. They represent the right person at
the right company, and they have a pain that your product can solve. However,
some of the leads are not a good fit. Some of the leads are PhD students from
Asia, simply doing research for their dissertations. These leads will probably
never be buyers of your product.

If some of the inbound leads are not qualified buyers, it does not mean inbound
is failing. The situation simply needs to be managed in the right way. Let's get
back to our example from the beginning of this chapter, in which the marketing
team has used inbound tactics to generate 500 leads per month. Let's take an
extreme case and assume that only 10 percent, or 50 of these leads per month,
are properly qualified leads. These 50 leads are beautiful leads. The companies
are a perfect “fit” because they all have a “pain” that you can solve. These leads
will probably close at twice the rate in half the time when compared to your
traditional outbound leads. This is a wonderful situation!

Here's the snag: if the marketing team passes all 500 of these inbound leads over
to sales, representing the 50 great leads and the 450 weak leads, the sales team
will ultimately hate the entire batch. Why? The sales team will need to crawl
through 10 leads just to find one solid one, which is a frustrating experience for
the salespeople.

Let's improve this process. If the marketing team filters the leads and passes only
the 50 great leads to sales, the sales team will think they have the best marketing
team on the planet. They will praise marketing. They will beg the executive team
to invest more in marketing.

When a company is in the early stages of its inbound marketing journey, the lead
filtering process does not need to be sophisticated. In many cases, someone on
the marketing team can simply screen the leads and pass the best ones through to
sales. In the early stages of inbound marketing, the lead flow is low enough that
this manual process is manageable. As lead flow increases, more advanced
techniques are needed, which I will address later in this chapter.

Avoid the Lead Scoring Trap

Once marketing teams increase their inbound lead flow volume, they often
introduce a lead scoring system. In general, implementing a lead scoring system
is a smart move. Unfortunately, lead scoring is often implemented in a manner
that causes more harm than good.

Issues arise when the lead scoring algorithm becomes too complicated. This is a