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5 Reasons Why Lead Management is More Than Lead Nurturing and Scoring

Jon Miller: VP of Marketing for Marketo | Articles > From the section: Lead Nurturing

November, 2014 |

One mistake many marketers make is to think of their lead management requirements too narrowly.
No doubt, 2 of the most important components of lead management are:

Lead nurturing, to educate buyers about the space and establishing that your company understands their problems and knows how to solve them
Lead scoring, to know when to pass leads to the sales team – and when to keep them in marketing for further nurturing.

Achieving the full benefits of lead management requires much more than just lead nurturing and scoring. By themselves, nurturing and scoring leads doesn't automate the marketing processes, especially the key interfaces to and from marketing and sales that are necessary to really unlock growth.
Here are my top 5 lead management best practices that go beyond lead nurturing and lead scoring:

Be everywhere. Cast your marketing net wide so customers will find you no matter where they are searching. As a corollary to this, focus heavily on best practices and thought leadership so prospects will find you even before they are looking for a solution.
Build prospect profiles. Create a lead database to manage and store all your leads and then make sure you have a strategy in place to keep that database clean. Collect information from your prospects over time and even more importantly build a profile of their interests and engagement by tracking their behaviors. This will allow you to segment your leads to precisely target them with the right message.
Automate lead handoffs. When a lead becomes sales ready, you want to get it to the right sales channel with as minimal impact to the sales team's current processes and workflows. Make sure to define different lead status values to indicate whether someone is a "qualified prospect but still nurturing" or a true "sales ready lead". When the conditions that define when a prospect becomes a lead are met, update the lead status inside the CRM.
Provide sales lead insight. It's not enough just to let the sales rep know they have a new lead. You also need to give them the history and insight about the interactions that caused that person to become a lead. Once sales is engaged with an opportunity, continue to provide information that helps them sell better and move the deal along faster.
Recycle leads as necessary. There are two forms of lead recycling. The first is when you assign a lead to a particular sales rep or partner and for some reason they don't or can't follow-up in a timely fashion. In this case, make sure you track when sales acts on a lead, and have a process in place to reassign the lead in a timely fashion if your ‘service level agreement' is not met.

Second, there will be times when a sales rep cannot connect with a prospect. Without the right lead management processes, reps will "hang on" to these leads, creating a black hole where leads aren't being nurtured yet sales cannot proactively engage. Create the ability for reps to recycle leads, and to specify the timeframe when they want that lead to come back to them.

About the Author:

Jon Miller is VP of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive revenue, improve accountability and generate sales leads. Contact Jon at [email protected].See an expanded version of this post at Modern B2B Marketing blog.