Contents

I Why You Need This Workbook............................................................................................................... 3

The Need for Marketing and Sales Alignment
The Lead-Management Challenge for B2B Marketers
The Lead-Management Solution

II What You’ll Learn from This Workbook.................................................................................................... 5

III When Hot’s Not: Lead Scoring for Better Results..................................................................................... 6

Why Top B2B Marketers Use Lead Scoring
Qualities of a Good Lead-Scoring Model
Properly Weighting Your Lead-Scoring Model
Key Points to Consider

IV Lead-Management Optimization Exercises: Preparing for Lead Scoring.................................................... 14

V From Cold to Hot: Lead-Nurturing Programs That Generate Sales......................................................... 18

What is Lead Nurturing?
Why Lead Nurturing is Essential
Steps to Develop a Lead-Nurturing Program
Map Lead-Nurturing Programs to Your Buying Cycle
Key Points to Consider

VI Lead-Management Optimization Exercises: Building a Lead-Nurturing Foundation................................... 27

VII Show How Marketing Makes Money: A 5-Step Plan for Proving ROI...................................................... 31
Define Marketing ROI and Obtain Agreement from the CEO and CFO
Create a Closed-Loop Process through Marketing Automation Platforms
Draft a Marketing ROI Plan and Include Sales in the Thought Process
Monitor Implementation and Identify Opportunities for Optimization
Incorporate ROI Findings into the Planning Process
Key Points to Consider

VIII Lead-Management Optimization Exercises: Proving the Value of Your Marketing Program........................ 38

IX Putting it all Together.............................................................................................................................. 39

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 I
Why
You This
NEED Workbook
For companies with high-involvement
sales cycles, the struggle to attract and
win new customers is an ongoing and
constant challenge. Now more than
ever before, marketers are feeling the
pressure to deliver more and better-
qualified leads to sales professionals. And
now more than ever, sales reps must be
able to focus on the strongest leads and
best opportunities to win new business.
Cold or cool leads can no longer be
tossed aside by either sales or marketing.
Every prospect that shows interest in a
company’s product or service must be
communicated with, educated, coddled,
nurtured and guided from the big end of
the sales funnel to the small one.
And when it’s all said and done,
marketing needs a measurable, repeat-
able process for generating return on
investment and proving the value it
contributes to the company’s bottom
line. You have to show the CEO the
3
money and prove how marketing
worked to ensure that profits landed
in the company ’s coffers—not in
your competitor’s.
The Need for
Marketing and
Sales Alignment
It’s no secret that marketing and
sales don’t understand each other. But
both groups are crucial to the success
of a business. Yet they often tend to
work in nearly impenetrable silos, lacking
common strategies, processes and
technologies.
This lack of cohesion and mutual
support makes it harder for both groups
to identify and sell to the right person at
the right time. Without visibility for both
sides of the equation, sales can’t identify
which marketing-generated leads to
work first, and marketing can’t tell what’s
happening to the leads they pass on to
sales. The connection is lost. And so too
is a percentage of business wins that
could have/should have come
your way.
The Lead-Management
Challenge for B2B Marketers
Marketers with high-involvement sales pro-
cesses face two primary challenges. They must:
1) Plug the leaky sales funnel.
• When marketing hands off unqualified leads,
it wastes sales’ time.
• When sales cherry-picks leads, buyers with
longer time frames for purchase leak out.
• When marketing spends more to recapture lost
leads, it increases customer acquisition costs.
2) Prove marketing’s value by showing
accountability for budget and activities
(show ROI).

The Lead-Management
Solution
To help close the loop between marketing and
sales and drive higher revenues, marketers must
institute an ROI-based marketing program and
lead-management process that encompasses
lead-information capture, scoring, routing and
monitoring. Lead-nurturing programs must be
incorporated to prevent leads from being lost
through “leaky sales funnels” and to decrease
customer acquisition costs. When marketing
departments work in concert with sales to
understand and focus on the importance of
providing quality leads rather than the merely a
large quantity of leads, they enhance sales
productivity and contribute measurable and
attributable ROI for their marketing programs.

By integrating marketing strategy with sales

execution and deploying the right tools and
techniques, marketers can ensure that sales
and marketing share a common understanding
of the lead-to-sales process, helping to build
a more productive rather than contentious
relationship between the two organizations.
 II
What you’ll
Learn from this
Workbook
Talk to any B2B marketer that has
tried and failed to institute a strong lead-
management process, and you’ll find
frustration equal to the task of herding
cats. The discussions that must occur
at every organizational level before a
marketer can even begin to consider, let
alone champion, the time and resource
investments necessary to institute a
sophisticated, revenue-enhancing lead-
management system are often compli-
cated and tricky.
This workbook will take you step-
by-step through the strategy, tactics
and implementation of a strong lead-
management program. You’ll learn the
key steps to maximizing the sales lead
process and marketing ROI, including:
• Developing a definition of a “qualified
lead” that both marketing and sales
agree on
• Creating a powerful lead-scoring
methodology
• Automating the lead-nurturing
process
• Implementing timely lead routing and
follow-up by sales
• Measuring marketing effectiveness
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The workbook will also help you to
create an ROI-focused marketing
approach and incorporate lead scoring
and lead nurturing as part of your overall
lead-management methodology. The
questions and worksheets at the end of
each section will assist you in defining
your needs and lay the groundwork to
help you get started.
Advances in Internet and software
technology have fundamentally altered
the ways in which marketers can com-
municate and measure the results of their
messages. Personalized conversations
and communications can be automated
in real time, driving prospects through
simple and complicated sales and
marketing processes. The information
and technology available today enables
marketers to make the shift from event-
driven, campaign-based mass marketing
to a minute-by-minute, fluid and ongo-
ing process that can be measured and
repeated.
We hope you find this B2B Lead-
Management Workbook valuable as you
take your marketing programs to the
next level, helping your sales organiza-
tion turn more prospects into customers
and making believers out of the C-suite
in the true power of your marketing
initiatives.
 III
When
Hot’s Not
[ Lead Scoring for Better Results ]
For any company with a sales force,
the definition of what comprises a
“hot” lead is often a much-debated
topic. While the marketing department
gleefully tosses anyone to sales who
has ever downloaded a white paper
or registered for a Webinar, sales often
considers such prospects as unqualified
and therefore unworthy of their time.
Or, even worse for the company’s
bottom line, they dutifully follow up on
each and every Tom, Dick or Harriett
that offers up contact info and end up
spinning their wheels, chasing down
people without the budget, authority or
even interest to purchase the company’s
products or services.
Defining a hot lead can be a struggle.
In fact, nearly half of all B2B marketers
(48 percent) tell Forrester Research that
lead quality is a top concern.1 Qualifying
leads through a comprehensive lead-
scoring model can alleviate that issue. A
formalized process alleviates confusion
over what constitutes a qualified lead.
When scoring criteria is developed jointly
by marketing and sales, the hand-off is
smoother and the outcome far more
likely to be successful. And with the right
approach and the right technology to
implement the program, lead scoring
can deliver high ROI with limited effort.
In this section, we’ll reveal the power
that a comprehensive lead-scoring model
can deliver, and help you understand the
key considerations necessary to arrive at
an accurate and reliable lead score.
6
Why Top B2B Marketers
Use Lead Scoring
So many leads...
...So little sales time
Leads flood into a marketing
organization from all directions and from
companies of all sizes. They arrive from
trade shows, online events, white paper
downloads, email campaigns, etc. Some
prospects are just researching; others
are in an active buying cycle. Some are
decision makers; others are end-users.
One of the biggest challenges
companies face is the inability to
touch all prospects in a timely
manner. If a “hot” lead is in the
queue, it could take too long
for sales to reach it before a
competitor whisks it away.
Marketers must figure out
how to sort and tend to a
wide array of potentially
valuable leads. Hot leads
need to be identified and
passed on to sales while
cooler prospects are
“warmed.” Otherwise,
leads—and the sales
opportunities and
revenue they
represent—
can be lost.
 Lead scoring is a method of assigning
points to different criteria for each lead
that flows into your marketing organiza-
tion. It allows you to rank and prioritize
your leads and determine the likelihood
of each becoming a customer. The score
is determined by adding up the points on
each of the criteria you have selected.
Based on a lead’s score, it will either
be routed to sales or continue to be
nurtured by marketing.
By sending sales a list of prospects
exhibiting criteria indicating they are
ready to buy, sales representatives will
be more likely to engage in meaningful
conversations with leads, rather than
spending time needlessly chasing down
cold opportunities.
A solid lead-scoring approach not
only helps you to rank prospects against
each other, but can smooth the lead flow
and help you build a more powerful and
accountable marketing organization
based on rigorous analysis and testing,
rather than intuition and educated guess-
work. By tagging individual opportunities
with a “propensity to buy” score, better
tactical decisions on handling leads can
drive significant improvements in both
marketing and sales results.
By assigning lead scores to prospects
and monitoring their movement from
initial inquiry to close, marketers
obtain valuable insights into their own
programs. You can determine, for
example, where your best leads come
from and what promotional offers are
most likely to move leads through the
sales funnel.
7
Qualities of a Good
Lead-Scoring Model
By measuring a person’s attributes and
behaviors over time, a good lead-scoring
methodology can accurately define a
person’s level of interest and whether
he or she represents a strong potential
opportunity for sales. Input from sales
is critical to an effective program. The
first thing you should do is sit down
with sales and determine which
attributes a prospect needs to have to
be considered a hot lead.
Everyone involved with this process
should understand that qualities identi-
fied when a lead-scoring model is first
developed can, and probably will,
change over time. In fact, one of the
many benefits of a sophisticated lead-
scoring solution is the insight it provides
regarding the attributes of your best
customers. The more data you add to
the model, the better you’ll be able to
understand where your best leads come
from, their needs and desires, and the
behavior they exhibit that leads them to
show up on the radar of your sales force.
Closing the Gap
Between
Marketing & Sales
Marketing organizations
reach and persuade
prospects while sales closes
deals. Both are crucial to
the success of a business,
yet the two groups tend
to work apart, lacking
strategies, processes and
technologies in common.
This split can have
devastating consequences
for the bottom line.
If you are not already on
the same page with your
sales organization about what
constitutes a “qualified lead,”
you need to be. This is the
first step to successfully
developing a lead-scoring
model.
 While simple lead scoring can evalu-
ate prospects based on information they
provided (e.g., industry, job title, loca-
tion), more sophisticated, automated
programs monitor prospect activity on
Web sites, in response to emails and
more. As the lead score of a prospect
changes based on behavior, the changing Which Web-site Pages Should You Score?
score can trigger re-routing based on
predefined rule sets. Hot leads can be
automatically flagged in Salesforce.com
The specific pages people visit on your Web site
or other contact management systems
can be a powerful indicator of interest in your
to alert sales for immediate follow-up.
products or services. If you offer high-value content on your
And because it’s an automated process,
Web site, you should add visits to those pages into your
sophisticated demand-management solu-
lead-scoring model.
tions take much of the resource burden
off marketing.
A good rule-of-thumb is to select pages with content that is
Data needed specific to a sub-segment of your potential customer base. If
for solid scoring someone arrives at such a page, you may take it as a strong
indicator of a good lead.
The most accurate lead-scoring
models include both explicit and implicit
In addition, consider scoring the pages people are taken to
information:
after completing a form, such as after they’ve requested a
• Explicit scores are based on white paper or a product demo. If someone makes it through
information provided by or about the a process on your Web site, it could mean they are
prospect—company size, job title, interested in hearing from you.
geographic location, etc.

• Implicit scores are derived from

monitoring prospect behavior—Web
site visits, white paper downloads, email
opens and clicks, etc.

Taken together, explicit and implicit

factors create a total picture of your
prospects that enables you to make an
accurate determination of their propen-
sity to buy. Let’s take a closer look at
attributes of both levels of data.

8
Explicit data
Demographics
The demographics section of a lead-
scoring model categorizes individuals
based on characteristics of both the
individual as well as the company, such
as name, occupation, email address,
company name, company size, etc.
Demographic and firmagraphic informa-
tion can be vital to an overall score,
particularly as you continue the lead-
scoring process and are able to identify
attributes of leads that generate sales.
For example, you might find that
mid-size companies in the Western
United States appear to have a greater
affinity for your product than those on
the East Coast. You could adjust your
marketing efforts and lead-scoring
techniques accordingly.
Although valuable, demographic
information can have pitfalls:
• Self-reported information tends
to be aspirational. People give
answers they believe are more desir-
able, such as overstating the size of their
company or their job role.
• Company information tends to
roll toward the mean. Prospects at
very large companies may downplay
organizational size in an attempt to
avoid sales harassment, while those at
tiny companies may pad their numbers
in order to be perceived as significant
players.
• People sometimes lie. Not every-
one will tell the truth on your forms.
For reasons ranging from annoyance
to secrecy, people reluctant to reveal
9
personal details will enter incorrect
information in order to download your
white paper or attend your Webinar.
In order to gather as much accurate
information as possible, keep in mind
that scoring doesn’t have to take place
all at once. A key attribute of a powerful
lead-scoring model is that you can grow
the data and alter the score over time.
(Just be certain that your lead-scoring
solution supports the fact that your data
will change over time.) By asking for a
minimal amount of information in the
beginning when someone downloads a
white paper or registers for a Webinar,
you can increase the chance that
prospects will complete your forms
rather than abandon them or enter false
information.
You may also want to append third-
party information to your database of
prospect information. Be certain your
lead-management software enables you
to do this. In addition, your lead-scoring
program should be flexible enough to
allow individuals such as salespeople to
add new data and change inaccurate
information as it is uncovered through-
out the course of the relationship.
Budget
Authority
Need
Timeline
The unreliability of demographic
information is one reason why your
lead-scoring methodology should not
rely on self-declared data alone. A solid
lead-scoring approach should also in-
clude data regarding a prospect’s values,
attitudes and interests.
Psychographic Information
Psychographics is self-declared infor-
mation designed to indicate how people
feel. When input on forms is accurate and
the right questions are asked, responses
can signal a lead’s readiness to be passed
on to sales.
Key psychographic information that
is necessary to accurately score a lead
encompasses the classic BANT model:
does the prospect have the Budget and
Authority to purchase your product; do
they Need the product; and how soon
is their Timeline for purchase? BANT
questions are designed to elicit highly
indicative information. This time-
honored methodology has been used
for years by sales organizations to grade
sales opportunities and identify appropri-
ate tactics for moving the deal forward.
The pitfall in using BANT data as a
heavy influencer of lead score is that
obtaining that kind of psychographic data
can sometimes be difficult. Prospects
aren’t always ready to “cut to the chase.”
They may want to hang on to their
BANT information until they feel they
know and trust you.
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Measure Frequency
for 1x Your
Buying Cycle
Over what length of
time should you measure
To overcome this reluctance, market-
ers should always offer value in exchange the frequency of an
for information. For example, a good action, such as visiting
time to solicit additional information the Web site, or opening
about a prospect is on the thank-you
page after someone has submitted a an email? A good rule of
form for one of your offers. Post-event thumb is to measure the
satisfaction surveys are another good frequency of a prospect’s
place to ask for details.
interactions over a period
It’s important to remember that a low of time that is equal
lead score does not necessarily signify a
to your buying cycle.
bad lead. It only signifies that a lead is
still unqualified. As you are able to gather Therefore, if your buying
information incrementally over time, cycle is 180 days long,
low-scoring leads may potentially grow actions that took place
into loyal customers. more than 180 days ago
To ensure that leads are scored cor- would be weighted
rectly, always ask for information in the relatively less than
same way across multiple points of data-
gathering. This guarantees that the data
more recent actions.
entering your system is consistent with
your scoring parameters. Because this
is not always possible (e.g., you receive
a mish-mash of job titles gleaned from
business cards gathered at a tradeshow),
make sure that your lead-management
system is flexible enough to be able to
match patterns from third-party data.
Implicit data
Behavioral Information
Behavioral information comprises the
implicit section of your lead score in
which you assign points based on spe-
cific actions undertaken by the prospect.
When you assign a score to behaviors,
choose only those activities that you
believe indicate that a person is highly
engaged with you.
Three components that measure
engagement should make up your
implicit lead score: actions, recency and
frequency. Although most lead-scoring
models account for actions, few are able
to incorporate frequency and recency
evaluations into the scoring model.
However, all three components are cru-
cial to an accurate lead score. Addition-
ally, the ability for scores to automatically
change over time is important, as we’ll
see later.
Actions
The first behavioral component is the
action itself. Some behaviors will merit a
higher score than others. For instance, if
someone visits your homepage, it might
not tell you very much, but if that person
drills four levels into your Web site to a
specific product page, that action might
imply a keen interest—one that warrants
a higher score.
Here are some high-value behaviors
to consider in your lead-scoring model:
• Forms submitted
Updated personal information
Signed up for newsletter
Requested demo
• Campaign activity
Attended a Webinar
Visited a tradeshow booth
Downloaded a white paper
• Web site activity
Requested demo
Viewed in-depth product page
11
Recency & Frequency
Additionally, top-notch lead-scoring
models also account for the recency
and frequency of the behavior—how
often and how recently a person took
an action. By adding these two elements
to the evaluation criteria, the model
enables scores to go up or down based
on prospect behavior.
This is a critical component of a
successful lead-management solution.
Any good sales rep knows that the quality
of a lead changes both over time and as
more or less interaction with the pros-
pect occurs. A lead that comes into the
system with an initially promising score
but missing one or two key elements
to make it hot needs to be re-scored
as actions take place that indicate the
prospect is ready to buy. Similarly, what
look like hot leads in the beginning can
erode down to lukewarm if the initial
burst of activity is followed by a lengthy
silence. Actions provide a foundation for
your implicit lead score, but in the absence
of context, they are one-dimensional.
To get a true picture of someone’s
actions, you must also measure how
recently and how frequently someone
has taken an action. Failing to do so
can lead to inaccuracies in your scoring.
These inaccuracies can lead to a high
number of unqualified prospects being
routed to the sales organization before
they are ready. An inaccurate implicit
score also can result in missed sales op-
portunities, as prospects that should be
qualified go unrecognized.
To illustrate the importance of recency
and frequency to lead scoring, consider
this scenario. You give prospects who
take a product demo a lead score of 50
points. So the prospect who took your
demo today and another who took it
six months ago would each have a lead
score of 50. But the person who most
recently took the demo is clearly more
likely to be in a more active phase of the
buying cycle than someone who took a
demo six months ago and has had no
other activity since. In another example,
without a frequency component to your
lead-scoring model, a prospect that has
been exploring your Web site a lot this
month will receive the same score as an-
other who landed on your site just once.
Time Yields Decaying
Lead Scores
Including recency metrics in lead
scoring is powerful because they add the
dimension of time to an implicit score.
If a person doesn’t repeat an action
within a certain amount of time, points
should drop off. Recency points can
decay over time until the score reaches
zero. If a person repeats an action, the
recency score can be reset, and the
process begins again.
Decay of point totals also helps keep
lead scores under control. Rather than
heaping new points on top of old scores
when someone repeats an action, a
model that takes into account recency
will peel off an action’s points over time
and reset the score when an action is
repeated.
12
Properly Weighting Your
Lead-Scoring Model
A combination of explicit and implicit
prospect information is the cornerstone
of a powerful lead-scoring methodology.
No single attribute is effective in isola-
tion. People give inaccurate details, and a
prospect’s actions may not indicate what
we think it does. Weighting the various
areas of demographics, psychographics
and behavior against each other helps to
balance lead scores and protect against
inaccuracies.
Despite this fact, a survey by SiriusDe-
cisions found that most marketers ignore
one or more of these elements in their Decay Recency
own lead scoring.2 When marketers at 2x Your
were asked which of the three attribute
families they were using to score leads, Buying Cycle
no category received higher than a
41-percent response rate. Researchers How long should it take
cautioned that this lack of balance can for a recency score to
lead to a high number of improperly reach zero? A good
scored leads and lost opportunities. rule-of-thumb is to set
How you weight your lead-scoring the range at twice the
model will depend on your unique length of your buying
business situation. And the manner in cycle. For example,
which you weight various attributes of marketers with a
prospect data can change over time as
90-day buying cycle
your lead-scoring program provides
insights into the characteristics of a hot would set a decay
lead. For example, you might begin by range of 180 days, so
giving more credence to leads from mid- after 180 days someone
size companies, but over time come to who took a single action
learn that buyers at enterprise-level
with no follow-up would
organizations are more often purchasers
no longer be considered
of your products. And, depending on
the product or service you’re offering,
a priority for sales
you might find that your best customers attention. Be sure your
eventually downloaded a white paper lead-scoring system has
on a particular topic, but few attended a the capability to decay
Webinar on a related topic. scores over time so you
don’t have to manually
monitor and update scores.
Fine-Tuning
Enhances Results
Lead scoring is a flexible methodology.
As you move through the process and
evaluate scores, you may discover that
some of your assumptions are incorrect;
for instance, that a high-level technol-
ogy executive is more apt to buy your
product than a technology manager.
Being able to fine-tune your scoring
model increases accuracy, resulting in
more qualified leads being sent to sales
and more deals being won.
Key Points to Consider
A key attribute of top-performing
demand creation marketers is their
ability to build processes and systems
that effectively track and manage leads.2
In the past, lead-scoring systems have
required a lot of hands-on maintenance
to tend to the model, and they have
been limited in the amount and kinds of
information marketers could use.
Fortunately, powerful solutions are
now available that streamline and
automate the lead-scoring process and
provide access to all the different
components of a lead score together in a
single platform. Today’s demand-gener-
ation marketing-automation applications
enable business-to-business and other
marketers with a complex sales process
to develop a complete, dynamic and
measurable lead-scoring process as part
of an overall lead-management system.
13
When you incorporate advanced
lead scoring, be sure your marketing-
automation solution and lead-scoring
model can:
• Support the frequency and recency
aspects of implicit scoring.
• Automatically factor time decay into
recency scores, eliminating need for
manual intervention.
• Impose point maximums on lead
scores to minimize the possibility of
inaccurately high totals.
• Allow scores to be updated with third-
party information such as data-appends
or data entry by your sales force.
• Automatically add new data as it is
gathered over time and re-score leads.
A strong lead-scoring model helps
close the gap between marketing and
sales. Not only does the sales team
enjoy a flow of better-qualified leads,
marketing is able to monitor the results
of its programs and track its successes.
Adjustments can be made to the market-
ing plan to improve the quality of leads
generated, and resources can be better
managed accordingly.
In short, with a strong lead-scoring
system in place, both sales and market-
ing will be hot, hot, hot.
 IV

Lead-Management
Optimization Exercises
[ Preparing for Lead Scoring ]

Determining what stage in the buying cycle each prospect is in and moving those
deemed “ready to buy” to the sales organization is key to a solid lead-management
program. By measuring a person’s attributes and behaviors over time, a good lead-
scoring methodology helps to rank prospects against one another, smooth the lead
flow and build a more powerful, accountable marketing organization.

This workbook section will help you gather the information you need to create
an accurate and reliable lead-scoring model. It will help ensure that you send only
qualified leads to sales, resulting in more deals being won and more measurable ROI
that can be attributed to your marketing organization. Use the information you gather
here and work with your demand-generation solution provider to create a powerful
lead-scoring methodology tailored to your unique business needs.

Questions may have multiple levels where “Yes” and “No” answers apply. For these
questions, your ultimate goal is to be able to check “Yes” to every question, at every
level.

Objectives of the Lead-Scoring Exercises:

Define What Constitutes a “Hot Lead”
• Determine which attributes and behaviors accurately define a person’s level of
interest and whether he or she represents a strong potential opportunity for sales.
Determine High-Value Self-Declared Information
• Decide which demographic and BANT information to seek in determining a lead’s
potential.
• Establish value proposition in exchange for a prospect’s BANT information.
Determine High-Value Activity/Behaviors
• Decide which activities are highly indicative of a propensity to purchase.
• Determine recency and frequency component of behavior.
Create a Formalized Process That Alleviates Confusion Over What
Constitutes a Qualified Lead
• Incorporate automated, advanced lead scoring to rank and prioritize leads and
determine the likelihood of each becoming a customer

14
Questionnaire to Assemble Lead-Scoring Data Points
The first step of incorporating a lead-management program is to coordinate with your sales counterparts.
If you are not already on the same page with your sales organization about what constitutes a “qualified lead,”
you need to be.
Meet with your head of sales and a handful of top reps and review the following questionnaire. Establish
a dialogue with your sales organization to develop a definition of what constitutes a “hot lead” based on
sales’ experience. This will help you begin building a solid lead-scoring methodology and will also cultivate an
atmosphere of participation and support for your ROI marketing initiatives.
Work with sales to answer each question (and any others the two teams feel are relevant) and score each
response. The range of scores you give is dependent on how finely tuned you want your lead-scoring process
to be. You can develop a range of 1 to 5, with 5 being “most likely to buy,” or use a 1-to-100 scale. At the end
of the exercises, you should all have a solid view of the various levels of leads that come into the sales pipeline
and a scoring factor for each.

Demographic Data:
1. Geographic location of company is important _________ yes _________no
• If yes, what areas of the country or world can you service? _____________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
2. Company size is important _________ yes _________no
• If yes, what criteria are most likely to indicate strong potential?
Number of Employees:
1-100 ___________
101-500 _________
501-1000 ________
> 1000 __________
Other Employee Breakdown ______________

Company Revenue:
< $500,000 _____
$500,000 - $1 million _____
> $1 million - $5 million _____
> $5 million - $20 million _____
> $20 million - $50 million _____
> $50 million - $100 million _____
> $100 million _____
Other Revenue Breakdown ________________

Size of company’s customer base:

< 50,000 customers _____
> 50,000 to 250,000 customers _____
> 250,000 to 500,000 customers _____
> 500,000 to 1 million customers _____
> 1 million to 5 million customers _____
> 5 million customers _____
Other Customer Breakdown_________________

Other demographic criteria indicating a strong lead _____________________

____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________

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BANT Data
1. Prospect has budget allocated ________ yes _________no
• If yes, what budget is required? ____________________
• If no, when will budget be allocated?
_____ When solution is identified
_____ After research regarding average costs for solution
_____ As part of next year’s budgeting process
_____ As add-on to this year’s budget
2. Prospect has the authority to make the purchase ________ yes _________no
• If no, who does? ______________________________________
• Is the person with budget authority approachable? ________ yes _________no
3. Does the company exhibit a need for your product or service? ________ yes _________no
• If yes, is the contact fully aware of the need? ________ yes _________no
• Will a substantial amount of education be necessary for the prospect to understand the value of
the product or solution? ________ yes _________no
4. What is the timeline for a purchase decision?
_____ Within 30 days
_____ 30-60 days
_____ 61-90 days
_____ 91 days to 1 year
_____ > 1 year
5. In addition to the demographic and psychographic (BANT) attributes you listed above, identify up to four
additional data points that you believe would be indicative of a propensity to purchase and valuable to a lead
score. Discuss your reasoning.
•_________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
•_________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
•_________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
•_________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________

6. Recognizing that prospects are often reluctant to divulge their purchasing budget, authority, product
need and purchasing timeline, what types of offers might entice prospects to share one of these key BANT
attributes?
• Webinar invite _________________ • Upgraded product warranty __________
• White paper download __________ • Conference registration _ ____________
• Product demo _________________ • Survey with drawing for prize _________
• Discount on first purchase ________ • Other ___________________________
• Contest entry_ ________________

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Implicit Data

7. What implicit data (or actions) indicates a prospect’s high propensity to buy?
_____ Downloaded white paper
_____ Visited product page on Web site
_____ Registered to receive newsletter
_____ Requested catalog
_____ Attended Webinar
_____ Attended Webinar and submitted questions during presentation
_____ Viewed online product demo
_____ Returned to Web site frequently in short period of time
_____ Other ________________________________

Additional considerations to determine lead score can include the following:

8. What is the average length of time for your product buying cycle? _________________

9. Determine how long it should take for a recency score to reach zero _____________
• Set the range at twice the length of your buying cycle. Marketers with a 90-day buying cycle
would set a decay range of 180 days, so after 180 days with no follow-up from a prospect
their lead score would deteriorate to zero. The recency portion of your lead-scoring model
should reset when the action is repeated.

10. How frequently should an action occur over a period of time that is equal to your buying cycle? ____
• A good rule of thumb is to measure the frequency of a prospect’s interactions over a period
of time that is equal to your buying cycle. Therefore, if your buying cycle is 180 days long,
actions that took place more than 180 days ago would be weighted relatively less than more
recent actions.

11. What value do you place on the domain name portion of the prospect’s email address? __________
• The domain name is the actual name for an IP address or range of IP addresses. You may elect
to score a prospect with a business email address higher than someone with a generic email
address, such as Hotmail.com, AOL.com, or Yahoo.com. Or, you may score a domain name
from a business you know is a potential customer higher than an unknown one. When
considering these tactics, keep in mind that some prospects may use generic email addresses
when first providing information. Be careful not to wash out potential customers based on this
criterion alone.

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 V

From
ColdtoHot
[ Lead-Nurturing Programs
That Generate Sales ]

Marketers eager to maximize the effectiveness of their efforts

and help drive revenue recognize that there’s much more to
success than dragging a boatload of leads through the door. Especially
for B2B companies involved in complex sales cycles, the art and science
of lead management is critical to reaching new prospects, improving productivity,
streamlining the lead-to-sales process, and improving marketing return-on-investment
and impact on company revenue.
Lead management encompasses five unique but critically important steps:

1. Lead generation: spreading a wide net to find as many prospective customers

as possible.

2. Lead scoring: determining what stage in the buying cycle each lead is at and
moving those deemed “ready to buy” to sales.

3. Lead nurturing: continually communicating to leads that are not yet ready to buy.

4. Lead notification & routing: providing the lead to the appropriate salesperson
in a timely manner, with the appropriate visibility into the lead “worth” and details of
interactions to marketing efforts.

5. ROMI analysis: identifying the specific market activities that bring in the best
revenue opportunities and adjusting marketing programs accordingly.

This section explains the importance of Step 3—lead nurturing—in the lead-
management process. It takes a look at best practices for nurturing leads in
today’s competitive business environment, and offers advice for implementing
a lead-nurturing program. Effective lead-nurturing programs can be simple or
complex. On one end of the spectrum, they consist of a basic sequence of timed
communications to all prospects to keep a company’s offerings in sight of
prospective buyers. More targeted and sophisticated programs include
automated, proactive communications triggered by the responses, behavior
or prior contact history of leads.

Ultimately, the most important thing about a lead-nurturing program is

that you begin one. Don’t just leave prospects out in the cold. Because if you
don’t take care of your sales leads, someone else will.

18
What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the practice of maintaining ongoing contact with prospects
identified as not yet ready to make a purchase. By implementing marketing
programs that gather information about where leads are in the buying cycle
and moving them along in that process while favorably influencing them
toward the company and its products, marketers are better able to influence
and support revenue generation, and to measure the impact of marketing
campaigns on sales results.

Lead nurturing is a proven lead-to-sale methodology that can move

prospects through the “sales funnel” toward purchasing your product or
service. It consists of a series of automated, timed communications designed to
build trust and keep your company top-of-mind until a prospect has received enough
information and is ready to buy. Lead-nurturing communications activities can include
informative emails, direct mail or telephone calls, Webinars, white papers, studies,
newsletters, product information, industry news and more.

Why Lead Nurturing is Essential

Sitting on leads is sitting on a gold mine. Your lead pool represents tremendous
value for your company. An organized process to move leads that are ready to buy
on to sales while ensuring that those with the potential to become qualified leads are
nurtured along through the sales cycle is essential to B2B marketing.
Actively Nurture
Leads for 1x
Analysts at Aberdeen Group found that companies with the highest lead-qualification
rates and lead-to-sales conversion rates are twice as likely as less successful companies
Your Sales Cycle
to leverage formalized lead metrics that manage the flow of leads from marketing to
sales and back again when warranted.3 How long should you
nurture your leads?
Most prospects become buyers (someone’s if not yours) The length of your
Most of the leads that come into your marketing organization are still in the early individual lead-nurturing
stages of the buying process. If you don’t make an effort to stay in front of these longer-
term prospects, they will simply move through the buying
programs can vary greatly.
cycle without you. You may even fall off their radar But a good rule of thumb
entirely as the time to purchase nears. Imagine the is to actively nurture each
pain of losing new business to a competitor because a lead for the length of
prospect simply forgot about you.
your average sales cycle.
Lead nurturing increases If they still haven’t
efficiency and ROI become marketing-
According to industry research firm Sirius- qualified as ready for sales,
Decisions, only about 53 percent to 68 percent of
you can move them into a
leads that are qualified by marketing as sales-ready
are accepted by sales. And, of those that are long-term nurture program
accepted, only about 50 to 57 percent are that enables you to
subsequently deemed to be sales opportunities.4 unobtrusively stay in front
This means that leads frequently fall out of the sales of them and ascertain
funnel after being handed off to sales. And many of
those leads that fall by the wayside will eventually buy.
when they re-engage
From your competition. or enter an active phase
of the buying cycle.
19
 Well-planned and highly successful lead-nurturing programs ensure that marketing
and sales work in concert to manage leads more efficiently. The first step is to get on
the same page with your sales organization about what constitutes a qualified lead.
When marketing sends sales only leads that meet the criteria jointly agreed upon by
both organizations, the sales team is able to focus on the most highly qualified leads
and achieve a higher conversion rate. Lead nurturing enables sales to work more
efficiently, close more deals and generate higher revenues.

It’s important to remember that, even with the best nurturing program, people
don’t always move through the process exactly as planned. Even “hot” leads can get
stalled. A budget gets cut; a timeline extended. To address the inevitability of hot leads
suddenly going cool, make sure your lead-management program allows sales to send
formerly qualified leads back to marketing for further nurturing. Similarly, marketing
must be able to easily alert sales when prospects sent back for nurturing become
re-engaged and are ready to be worked.

Most B2B marketers are familiar with the ubiquitous sales funnel. Hundreds or
thousands of leads flow into one end, and a trickle of qualified leads emerges out the
other end to be worked by sales. It’s not really a funnel as much as it is a sieve. Leads
with enough bulk surrounding them (budget, authority to buy, need, timeline and
more) are pulled out by sales and worked. The rest seep out. Capturing the leads that
slip through the sieve and allowing them to flow into a special marketing program is
the secret of a successful lead-nurturing program.

Measuring the ROI of Lead Nurturing

Marketers seeking to justify and increase budgets are under

increasing pressure to demonstrate the effectiveness and worth
of their programs. Simply measuring the number of leads generated by a
marketing campaign won’t give you enough insight to determine the ultimate
effectiveness of your marketing program and its impact on the bottom line.
To evaluate marketing ROI, you need to calculate:
• The percentage of marketing-qualified leads accepted by sales
• The percentage of sales-accepted leads that become sales-qualified
• The percentage of marketing-qualified leads that ultimately result in
closed business

To show how marketing contributes to the bottom line, you must get
together with your sales organization, carefully define and agree on what
you mean by ROI, and align your objectives. Make sure you understand
your company’s revenue and sales goals. Determine the number of sales-
qualified leads that marketing needs to deliver and how many new leads are
generally required to meet that goal. These calculations vary widely by
industry, company, and competence of both the sales and marketing teams.

20
Steps to develop a
Lead-Nurturing program
Following are three steps to get you started with a lead-nurturing program.

Step 1:
Keep talking
An easy yet powerful lead-nurturing initiative would be to simply send all leads
in need of warming an automated, timed series of messages designed to keep your
company and its products top-of-mind as the prospect moves through the buying
cycle. At a minimum, you will want to contact everybody at least once, so that no one
goes an entire sales cycle without having received a touch.

For simplicity’s sake, you can use a single channel, such as email, telesales or direct
mail to maintain contact with leads in need of warming. But you can also mix it up.
For instance, follow up an email inviting a prospect to join your newsletter with a call
from inside sales. Then, follow that with a direct mail thank you for their time that
encourages them to attend your next Webinar. Be sure to give prospects in your
lead-warming program the ability to indicate that they may be ready to buy. This can
be accomplished by making it easy for leads to update their information or requesting
a demo or call from a sales representative.

21
Step 2:
Hold individual conversations
People buy for different reasons. One buyer may be severely price-sensitive while
another may be more concerned about training modules and customer support. To
warm leads into a sales-ready condition, it’s important to increase the relevance of
your messaging whenever possible. You can start by sending all leads the same initial
message, but include a survey question with several possible answers. For example,
ask prospects to select their greatest need, challenge or top priority related to the
products or services you offer.

Base subsequent messaging on each person’s response. This more targeted

approach enables those who select one answer to receive one series of communica-
tions, while those who select a different answer receive another.

A slightly more complex lead-nurturing tactic would be to segment leads by criteria

that indicate their propensity to buy as they come into your nurturing program—such
as by response to questions they answer to download a white paper. For instance,
those who indicate short purchasing timelines could be routed immediately to sales,
while those who indicate longer timelines could receive longer-term communications,
such as educational materials and case studies, and those who say they are “just
researching” could be excluded from lead nurturing altogether.

Step 3:
Target high-potential leads
Once you get a basic lead-nurturing program into place, you can begin to hone
your targeting to more actively propel nearly sales-ready leads forward in the sales
funnel. Communications campaigns based on the lead’s location in the buying cycle
can be automated to deliver the right information to the right prospect at the right
time. For example, you might send prospects just beginning to search
for solutions a white paper about industry issues to establish your
company’s thought capital. Next, follow up with an invitation
to a Webinar showcasing research explaining how various
technologies solve the issue in question. Next, send a
survey to identify movement along the sales cycle, and
depending upon results, use telesales to ascertain
whether they are ready to begin evaluating solutions.

At the point that the lead can be moved to sales,

it doesn’t have to be abandoned by marketing.
Marketing should monitor the progress of the lead and
be ready to fold it back into the lead-warming process
if sales determines it needs additional nurturing.

22
From COOL Interest to
HOT Pursuit of solutions
[ Messaging that moves prospects off the dime ]
The technology of an automated, triggered lead-warming process is only a part of
the program. Once you have prospects lined up to listen to your enticements, what
will you tell them? At this stage in the game, a strong lead-nurturing program employs
two-way messaging that helps marketers better understand a prospect’s needs while
at the same time instilling confidence in the company’s ability to meet those needs.

Recognize that potential customers have important and

complex decisions to make. As they move through the
buying cycle, they must:
• Understand the possible solutions to their problem.
• Identify companies offering those solutions.
• Familiarize themselves with your company.
• Perceive that you are an industry leader and expert.
• Be confident you understand their specific needs and
can solve them.
• Trust you enough to want to enter into a business
relationship with you.
As you create your lead-nurturing messages, make sure
you answer the following questions:
• How can we build credibility with our prospects?
• How can we show that our products and services will
help them achieve their goals?
• How can we differentiate ourselves from the
competition?

Lead nurturing is not the practice of bombarding
people with promotional messages and calls to see if
they’re ready to buy. Lead nurturing is a process that is
used to educate leads about various solutions—and yours
in particular—and become a trusted advisor. Whether
at the beginning or end of the sales cycle, the goal of a
strong lead-nurturing campaign is to ensure that prospects
will immediately think of you when they are ready. Good
lead-nurturing messages provide insights and solutions,
not overt sales pitches.
Impressions: The sum of all marketing
exposure across all lead-generation campaigns.
Inquiries: Person has “raised hand” by
responding to an offer or requesting information.
Marketing Qualified: Through a series of actions
and interactions, a prospect indicates an intention to
buy, and the lead is sent to sales for follow-up.
Sales Accepted: Sales acknowledges that the
agreed-upon definition of “qualified” has been met,
and works the lead.
Sales Qualified: Sales determines that an
opportunity exists, and the lead enters the sales
pipeline.
New Business: Opportunity results in a closed sale.

23
Map Lead Nurturing
to your Buying Cycle
[ Segment to increase relevance ]
Although you can send everyone in your lead-nurture program the same series of
messages, dividing your prospects into groups enables you to more effectively:
• Target communications in order to increase relevancy
• Align your marketing and sales resources
• Transition from product-centric to customer-centric messaging

You can segment your leads based on:

• Demographic information
• BANT information (Has Budget allotted; Authority to purchase; a Need that we
solve; a defined Timeline to purchase)
• Behaviors

To understand how to best influence prospects, you must understand your buying
cycle—the sequence and duration of phases that a typical customer goes through when
deciding to purchase your product or service. Mapping your lead-nurturing programs to
these phases is key to moving prospects through the purchasing process.

Top-notch lead nurturing consists of incubating prospects until they are ready to buy, both
before and after the hand-off to sales. To ensure that the maximum number of prospects
make it into the sales pipeline and result in new business, marketing must continue to work
with sales to create and send appropriately timed nurturing messages, even after leads have
been passed to sales. Let’s examine the four basic phases of a buying cycle—Awareness,
Evaluation, Choice and Purchase—and how lead nurturing can be used to influence each.

Buying Cycle Phase 1:

Awareness
Buyers have decided to act, and they
are searching for and evaluating solutions.
They have indicated a specific need or
interest in your product or service.

• Goal of nurturing program at

this stage: To assess whether they are
ready to be sent to sales; to assist them
in identifying their decision criteria, to

24
position your solution with these criteria
in mind; and to learn more about their
needs and respond with appropriate
information.
• Common elements of nurture
program at this stage: An automated
series of communications that offers
white papers, case studies and testimo-
nials, Webinars, special event invitations
and product/service data sheets.
Buying Cycle Phase 2:
Evaluation
Buyers have decided to act, and they
are searching for and evaluating solutions.
They have indicated a specific need or
interest in your product or service.
• Goal of nurturing program at
this stage: To assess whether they are
ready to be sent to sales; to assist them
in identifying decision criteria; to position
your solution with these criteria in mind;
and to learn more about their needs and
respond with appropriate information.
• Common elements of nurture
program at this stage: An automated
series of communications that offer white
papers, case studies and testimonials,
Webinars, special event invitations and
product/service data sheets.
Buying Cycle Phase 3:
Choice
Buyers have evaluated solutions and
have narrowed their choices. They begin
thinking about the personal and business
risks that may be involved. They take
actions highly indicative of a decision to
buy, such as updating personal informa-
tion, viewing an in-depth product page,
or requesting a demo or sales call-back.
25
• Goal of nurturing program at
this stage: To uncover prospects’
perceived risks and help find ways to
Contact Prospects
alleviate them; to help buyers justify a Once for Each
decision to choose your company and Month of Your
its products.
Sales Cycle
• Common elements of nurture
program at this stage: At discretion How often should you
of assigned sales representative, an
automated series of communications
contact your prospects via
offering pricing comparisons, feature a lead-nurturing program?
comparisons, product capabilities, data A good rule of thumb
sheets, testimonials, assisted demo, free is to contact people one
trial and relevant marketing statistics can
time for each month
be sent.
of your sales cycle.
Buying Cycle Phase 4: So if it typically takes
Purchase a prospect nine months
Buyers have selected your solution from awareness to
and are ready to purchase. Negotiations purchase, you should have
and contractual agreements are being
nine touch points to
finalized. Sales interaction validates
guide leads to conversion.
buyer decisions to purchase. Active lead
nurturing has concluded, but marketing But also keep in mind
organization continues to track sales op- that how frequently you
portunity through to close to ascertain/ contact someone is also
confirm role in closed business/ROI. related to the value
• Goal of nurturing program and timeliness of your
at this stage: To minimize “buyer’s
content as well as the
remorse” and to instill an early sense of
unique business needs of
value in the purchase decision.
your industry or prospects.
 • Common elements of nurture
program at this stage: Product ac-
colades, success stories, key contact
references and personal thank-you
messages.
Offers aligned to the buying cycle
not only keep more prospects in the
pipeline, they help you learn more
about your potential customers’ needs
and nudge them closer to a purchase.
Many industry experts believe offers are
critical to moving B2B as well as B2C
prospects through the buying process.
Have a library of offers suitable for buy-
ers in each category of your sales chain.
Key Points to Consider
Marketers tend to think of their role
as lead generators only until leads are
ready to be handed off to sales. But
the best lead-management systems will
consider the entire process from inquiry
to sale.
Fortunately, powerful tools are now
available that enable B2B and other
marketers with complex sales processes
to develop a dynamic, repeatable and
measurable lead-nurturing process. In
fact, Aberdeen found that 73 percent of
top-performing companies use a lead-
management system.3 These systems
are designed to increase response rates,
accelerate sales opportunities and pro-
vide visibility into marketing initiatives.
Tightly integrated with a company’s
CRM or sales force automation system,
they allow for accurate, unbiased ROI
reporting, clearly demonstrating market-
ing’s successes and overall contribution
to the company’s business goals.
26
When you incorporate lead nurturing
into your overall lead-management plan,
be sure your marketing automation
solution can:
• Continue to nurture leads even
after they’ve been handed off to sales.
• Return stalled leads back into
ongoing marketing programs for further
nurturing.
• Alert sales in real time when leads
re-engage or take specific actions that
could indicate a readiness to buy.
• Track sales-accepted follow-up in
an automated fashion.
• Track nurture-influenced revenue
in order to fully measure your marketing
program’s success.
A study issued by analyst firm Gartner
found that marketing automation is one
of the fastest-growing CRM investment
areas—a trend it expects to continue
through 2011. Gartner estimates that
companies that implement lead-man-
agement solutions such as those offered
by Silverpop Vtrenz and others will see
as much as a 50-percent increase in
lead-conversion rates.5 So if you haven’t
implemented an automated lead-
management program, now is the time.
 VI

Lead-Management
Optimization Exercises
[ Building a Lead-Nurturing Foundation ]

As we learned in the previous section, lead nurturing is the practice of maintaining

contact with prospects identified as not yet ready to make a purchase. It consists of
a series of automated, timed communications designed to build trust and keep your
company top-of-mind until a prospect has received enough information and is ready to
buy. This workbook section will help you to build credibility with your prospects. It will
also help you create a series of communications mapped to each phase of your buying
cycle. The information you enter here will be instrumental in the creation of a power-
ful lead-nurturing program that enables you to better influence and support revenue
generation and to measure the impact of marketing campaigns on sales results.

Objectives of the Lead-Nurturing Exercises:

Build Credibility with Prospects

• Show that products and services will help them achieve their goals.
• Differentiate company, products and services from the competition.
• Segment to increase relevance.

Map a Lead-Nurturing Program to Your Buying Cycle

• Phase 1: Awareness
• Phase 2: Evaluation
• Phase 3: Choice
• Phase 4: Purchase

Create a Dynamic, Repeatable and Measurable Lead-Nurturing Process

• Incorporate automated lead nurturing into your overall lead-management
plan to continually communicate with prospects that are not yet ready to
buy and move them through the buying process.

Calculate ROI of Lead Nurturing

• Apply three metrics to help determine effectiveness of your lead-nurturing
program.

27
Questionnaire to Construct a Lead-Nurturing Foundation
When thinking about each question below, consider one or more messages that can be sent to prospects
within each segment that can move them along in the sales cycle. Focus first on those attributes you rated
high in the lead-scoring process in Section IV of this workbook.

1. Identify the top four biggest problems or challenges that leads coming into our marketing organization are
trying to solve:
1._____________________________________________________________________
2._____________________________________________________________________
3._____________________________________________________________________
4._____________________________________________________________________

2. List the most important benefits we offer that address these challenges:
1._____________________________________________________________________
2._____________________________________________________________________
3._____________________________________________________________________
4._____________________________________________________________________

3. List the competitive differentiators we possess that enable our customers to solve these challenges:
1._____________________________________________________________________
2._____________________________________________________________________
3._____________________________________________________________________
4._____________________________________________________________________

4. What prospect segmentations should be created in order to reach the right person with the right mes-
sage? Evaluate each of the criteria below that was identified as important in Section V and define a core
message for each.

Repeat this process for each state of the buying cycle.

• Phase 1: Awareness
Goal of nurturing program at this stage is to reinforce awareness of need, identify solutions and create inter-
est in further exploration.

• Phase 2: Evaluation
Goal of nurturing program at this stage is to assess whether prospects are ready to be sent to sales; to assist
them in identifying their decision criteria and position your solution with these criteria in mind; and to learn
more about their needs and respond with appropriate information.

• Phase 3: Choice
Goal of nurturing program at this stage is to uncover prospects’ perceived risks and help find ways to allevi-
ate them, and to help buyers justify a decision to choose your company and its products.

• Phase 4: Purchase
Goal of nurturing program at this stage is to minimize “buyer’s remorse” and to instill an early sense of value
in the purchase decision.

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Key Messages for Important Segments
(Copy form for each of the Four Purchasing Phases and determine key message points for each segment.)

• Number of Employees:
1-100 _ _______________________________________________
101-500 _______________________________________________
501-1000_ _____________________________________________
> 1000________________________________________________
Other Employee Breakdown _______________________________

• Company Revenue:
< $500,000 ____________________________________________
$500,000 - $1 million_ ____________________________________
> $1 million - $5 million_ __________________________________
> $5 million - $20 million __________________________________
> $20 million - $50 million _________________________________
> $50 million - $100 million ________________________________
> $100 million __________________________________________
Other Revenue Breakdown _ _______________________________

• Size of company’s customer base:

< 50,000 customers _ ____________________________________
> 50,000 to 250,000 customers _ ___________________________
> 250,000 to 500,000 customers____________________________
> 500,000 to 1 million customers____________________________
> 1 million to 5 million customers _ __________________________
> 5 million customers _____________________________________
Other Customer Breakdown________________________________

• Other demographic criteria indicating a strong lead _________________________________

________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

BANT Data
• Prospect has budget allocated _ ___________________________
• Allocated budget appropriate for company’s solution ___________
• Allocated budget too low for company’s solution_ _____________
• Prospect doesn’t have budget allocated _ ____________________
• Budget will be allocated when solution is identified _____________
• Budget will be allocated after research regarding average costs for solution ___________________

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• Budget will be allocated as part of next year’s budgeting process _ _________________________
________________________________________________________________________
• Budget will be added on to this year’s budget _ _______________________________________
• Prospect has the authority to make the purchase ______________________________________
• Prospect doesn’t have the authority to make the purchase _______________________________
• The company exhibits a need for your product or service _ ______________________________
• A substantial amount of education is necessary for the prospect to understand the value
of the product or solution _ ______________________________________________________
• The timeline for a purchase decision is:
Within 30 days _______________________
30-60 days__________________________
61-90 days__________________________
91 days to 1 year _____________________
> 1 year ___________________________

11. Identify key messages to accompany the four additional data points identified in Section IV (if any) that
would move such a prospect down the sales funnel.
• ________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
• ________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
• ________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
• ________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

• Create core messaging points that can be included in autoresponders in response to each of the
activities listed below. Recognizing that prospects are often reluctant to divulge their purchasing
budget, authority, product need and purchasing timeline, what types of offers might entice prospects
to share one of these key BANT attributes?
• Webinar invite _ ________________ • Upgraded product warranty ____________
• White paper download ___________ • Conference registration _______________
• Product demo__________________ • Survey with drawing for prize _ _________
• Discount on first purchase _ _______ • Other ____________________________
• Contest entry __________________

• Create core messaging points based on a prospect’s specific area of interest. For example, did the
person visit a specific area of your Web site numerous times? Do their actions indicate that they are
in a sales, marketing or IT role? ___________________________________________________

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Vtrenz is a registered trademark of Vtrenz, Inc.
 VII
Show How
Marketing
Makes
Money
[ A 5-Step Plan for Proving ROI ]
John Wanamaker, inven-
tor of the department store
concept in the early 1900s,
is perhaps best known for
his famous quote, “Half
the money I spend on
advertising is wasted; the
trouble is, I don’t know
which half.” Trouble also is,
not much has changed over
the last hundred years.
There are perplexed looks on the
faces of businessmen and women across
the land these days. Responsible for the
steady growth of revenue for their com-
panies, these intrepid marketers ponder
how best to move the sales needle. The
conundrum is that even when sales go
through the roof and the company is
breaking budget expectations left and
right, marketers still aren’t sure about
the true role their programs may have
actually played in the company’s suc-
cess. More importantly, neither are their
CEOs.
Study after study has pointed out the
difficulty marketers have in measuring
the ultimate impact of their programs on
sales results. Yet the ability to accurately
assess marketing’s return-on-investment
is increasingly critical to corporate
success. Accountability has become the
watchword in offices around the globe. 38% of marketers say
Marketers are under increasing pressure
to deliver measurable results and clearly
new marketing campaigns
demonstrate the value they provide. are rushed to market
based on the limited
Yet for too long and in too many
intuition of a few people.6
organizations, marketing activities have
been led more from the gut than the
brain. In fact, 38 percent of market-
ers say new marketing campaigns are
rushed to market based on the limited
intuition of a few people.6 Unfortunately,
it is the nature of many marketers and
nearly all of the agency account repre-
sentatives who work on their behalf to
prefer the creative, right-brain type of
marketing activities over the decidedly
less sexy, left-brain analytics needed to
prove marketing ROI. Rather than pore
over numbers and spreadsheets, most
marketers would prefer to fine-tune the
creative brief for the next ad campaign.
Instead of diving into a lead-source
cost analysis, they would better enjoy
supervising the photo shoot for the next
ad campaign.
And while many marketers don’t
particularly want to dive deep into the
analytical end of marketing, most don’t
have the data to make it worth their
while in the first place. In fact, a study
reported by MarketingProfs.com found
that measuring the financial impact of
marketing campaigns is a substantial
challenge for most marketers. Forty-two
percent say their company’s ability to
measure financial returns from market-
ing programs is “a long way from where
it could be.”6
Improving the ability to accurately
track and measure marketing’s impact
on sales is critical to improving revenue.
It’s not just to ensure hefty year-end bo-
nuses and improved job stability for the
CMO. Measuring marketing ROI helps
to ensure that a successful program
continues to outperform competitors,
and that an unsuccessful one is able to
find the right mix of marketing activities
that can lead to improved sales.
It’s not an issue of supplanting the
art of marketing with a bean-counter
mentality. Rather than viewing it as an
either/or situation, successful marketers
see the need for high levels of innovation
and creativity set on a solid foundation
of careful analysis and testing. Both
creativity and analysis are necessary to
sell more, and to sell more quickly and
efficiently. An effective combination of
the art and science of marketing delivers
strong ROI.
Whether you are just starting to
identify key metrics to show your CEO
and others within the organization
how marketing contributes to the
bottom line, or have already
begun the process, this section
outlines a simple plan to help
ensure that the outcome
of your evaluation efforts
is both meaningful and
manageable.
Improving the ability to
accurately track and measure
marketing’s impact on sales is
critical to improving revenue.
 Step 1:
Define Marketing ROI and
Obtain Agreement from the CEO and CFO
Before you can actually begin to
establish a link between certain market-
ing activities and revenue generated by a
sales force weeks or months (or years!)
after a campaign hits the marketplace,
you must first spend time carefully
defining exactly what you mean by
“return-on-investment”. The term repre-
sents different things to different people
and is bandied about by many without
solid agreement regarding its true
meaning as defined inside the company.
In fact, Forrester Research found that
nearly seven out of 10 marketers (69
percent) have a hard time arriving at an
agreed-upon definition of ROI.7
There’s more to implementing a
strong marketing program with proven
ROI than creating a spreadsheet and
plugging in numbers. The value of ROI
marketing lies not only in the ability to
measure, but also to establish a manage-
ment viewpoint that allows for changes
in organizational design and business
processes based on the outcomes of
that analysis. To truly measure market-
ing effectiveness and then benefit from
the findings, companies often have to
engage in a new way of thinking.
Credibility from c-level executives
and their commitment to champion
careful measurement of marketing activi-
ties across departments is a crucial first
step. In fact, three out of four marketers
acknowledge that the ability to track
marketing ROI gives them more respect
in their organizations.3 To accurately
evaluate the impact marketing activities
33
have on sales results, marketing and sales
departments must be aligned regarding
goals and outcomes and how they are
measured.
Even when sales and marketing work
collegially together, support and interest
Forrester Research found
from a company’s top management
team can play a deciding factor in the that nearly seven out of
success of implementing a program to 10 marketers (69%)
measure the effectiveness of specific
have a hard time arriving
marketing activities. They’re also critical
at an agreed-upon
to the ability to use those findings to
make course corrections when neces- definition of ROI.7
sary.
No matter how good the creative,
how spectacular the media buy, or how
many times the phone rang off the wall
with customers calling in, the ability to
accurately measure the impact of specific
marketing activities in a meaningful way Three out of four
must start with an agreement with
marketers acknowledge
sales on what consti­tutes a strong lead.
that the ability to track
Simply measuring the number of leads
generated by a marketing campaign marketing ROI gives
doesn’t provide enough insight to them more respect in
determine the ultimate effectiveness of their organizations.3
the marketing program. Leads must be
qualified in some manner consistent with
the company’s business goals. Obtaining
both sales and marketing agreement
about what a qualified lead looks like
can be a ticklish and sometimes even
contentious process. But it must be
done. And agreement must be reached
before accurate evaluations concerning
marketing endeavors can move forward.
 Step 2:
Create a Closed-Loop Process
through Marketing Automation Platforms

Allow new technologies to pave the metrics like the number of leads gener-
way toward incorporating sales and ated from a specific campaign, marketers
marketing efforts through new and can find out how much revenue is
highly efficient processes. Establishing a created from a specific lead source.
closed-loop marketing program allows Marketers can also measure the average
for a system with active and timely number of touch points from marketing
feedback from sales and real insights or sales necessary to close a lead, or
into how various marketing activities are which marketing offer produces the
driving revenue. This is a critical step in most or best leads.
the process of showing how marketing
Because all the data exists in one
makes money for the organization. Yet
relational database, this marketing
only 15 percent of marketers report
automation design allows marketers
using a closed-loop marketing process.8
to collect, score, segment, route and
The most highly recommended track leads from any source. It gives all
design of a strong marketing automa- key stakeholders visibility into marketing
tion platform utilizes a single relational initiatives and makes data accessible that
database to collect, manage, segment, can help various business units improve
execute, automate and integrate all performance.
marketing campaigns. This allows for
complete, accurate, timely and unbiased
ROI reporting. Marketing automation
platforms allow companies to manage
lead generation, lead nurture, lead-
to-sales processes and relationship
marketing programs, delivering full
closed-loop ROI reporting and complete
customer communication management.
In addition to traditional marketing

Campaign Metrics & The Closed-Loop Process

34
 Step 3:
Draft a Marketing ROI Plan
and Include Sales in the Thought Process

Sounds like heresy, doesn’t it? It’s not. Whatever measurement criteria you
Marketers and sales departments should choose to start with in establishing the
complement the plans and outcomes value marketing brings to the organiza-
of the other. Both should be able to tion, it’s important that it holds up under
provide input into defining business scrutiny from a financial perspective in
goals and processes. order to gain and maintain credibility
among c-level executives. Unfortunately,
Begin by building performance met-
establishing a solid plan for ROI
rics into the marketing plan. Just as sales
marketing can be difficult. Even when
is tasked with reaching certain revenue
a company has good data for analysis,
benchmarks, every marketing project or
it’s all too often siloed away in various
spend should have clear performance
departments. Integrating data from
criteria delineated at the outset as well.
across an enterprise can be hard work.
Continually discuss metrics and findings
among staff, cross-functionally with If you feel there are organizational
other departments and with superiors. barriers that hinder your ability to gather
Obtain buy-in on the process that allows meaningful data, start by simply bringing
marketing to reset direction based on some basic financial intelligence into
the results. the decision process. Conduct basic
ROI projections using the information
A fluid, market-responsive marketing
available. Starting the process in even
program has the highest likelihood of
small ways can underscore to executives
success. Knowing what works well
your commitment to doing the right
and what doesn’t, and making course
thing. As you use financial data in your
corrections accordingly, can only be
planning processes, you will begin to be
accomplished with a metric-focused
better able to define what needs to be
marketing plan.
measured and how best to measure it.
Metrics that incorporate sales data
and are commonly used by marketers
to track ROI include:9 25%
• Number of leads generated 12%
• Total sales revenue generated by 20%
100,000
marketing Target 30%
25,000
• Incremental sales revenue from Audience Segmented
20%
3,000
existing customers generated by List Campaign 30%
600
marketing Response
Pre-Qualified 30%
180
• Cost per lead generated Needs 40
• Conversion rates Analysis Solutions 12
• Time to conversion Demo Scope &
4
Proposal
New
Clients

Measuring at Each Step in the Process

35
 Step 4:
Monitor Implementation
and Identify Opportunities for Optimization

In the beginning, putting a robust ROI
marketing program into action can seem
a bit overwhelming. Only 17 percent of
marketers told Forrester Research they
set goals or objectives for marketing
metrics.8 As with any task that looms
large over the landscape, it’s often best
to tackle the monster a little bit at a time.
If you’ve obtained agreement regarding
the definition of ROI, work backward
from there. Create a road map that
breaks up the journey to the desired
metric into manageable and measurable
stages.
Don’t try to measure every marketing
activity right from the beginning. Instead,
first identify which measurements can be
expected to provide the clearest insights
into the process and would have the
greatest impact on decisions regarding
next steps. For example, start by com-
paring the quality of leads generated by
online ads on various sites to determine
where you’re generating the most quali-
fied responses as opposed to the largest
number. As you gather information
about ad response rates, you can then
add to the evaluation the quality of leads
from other sources such as through
trade shows or the downloading of
white papers.
Monitoring marketing ROI can begin
simply by identifying the cost of each
marketing activity and tracking the leads
each brings into the sales pipeline. Add
a lead-scoring process to the program
and you have enriched the ability to
identify the most effective marketing tac-
tics. Again, agreement and support from
sales and executive management on
definitions—in this case the criteria for
what constitutes a “qualified” lead—is a
key component of the program.
Identifying the lead source of pros- Measuring marketing ROI
pects can be among the more difficult
pieces of marketing information to track
is about more than
simply justifying budgets.
accurately, especially in organizations
with multiple marketing programs or It is the means by which
channels. Integration of marketing and companies can move
sales databases enables marketers to
forward, gaining more
dive into the data and obtain meaning-
market share and
ful measurements. Such integration is
delivering more revenue
necessary to calculate lead-conversion
rates and costs per lead. with greater efficiency.
The lead-conversion rate is simply
the number of sales for each lead source
divided by the total number of leads
the source generated. Lead-conversion
rates give marketers insight into the
quality of leads generated from each
source. And the time to conversion
is simply the average amount of time
that lapses between when a lead is first
forecast and when it finally converts to
sale. This is useful in identifying trends
or techniques that might shorten the
sales cycle and begin generating revenue
sooner.
Cost per lead by lead source is
calculated by dividing the cost of the
source by the number of leads it
generated. This calculation can help
marketers better evaluate results and
plan inclusion of those activities which
have the highest ROI in future campaigns.
As your ROI measurements become
more sophisticated, consider evaluating
metrics such as lifetime customer value.

36
More than four out of 10 marketers (42
percent) plan to begin incorporating
more analysis of customer profitability/
lifetime value into their evaluation
processes.7
Step 5:
Incorporate
ROI Findings into
the Planning Process
Knowing what works is just as
important today as it was back in
Wanamaker’s day. Luckily for 21st
century marketers, technologies exist to
deliver the data necessary to accurately
measure marketing’s impact on sales and
improve the results of future programs.
Still, Forrester Research has found
that 64 percent of marketers find it dif-
ficult to develop needed improvements
to reporting systems.7 Nevertheless, it is
well worth the effort to build the case
with management that increased funding
for better measurement and analytics
is fully justified by the expected incre-
mental revenue. Calculating the ROI of
marketing endeavors and adjusting plans
accordingly can play an important role in
improving sales and boosting revenue.
By leveraging your analysis properly, you
can drive smarter decisions resulting in
more favorable outcomes that optimize
results over time.
Measuring marketing ROI is about
more than simply justifying budgets. It
is the means by which companies can
move forward, gaining more market
share and delivering more revenue with
greater efficiency.
37
Key Points to Consider
Keep in mind that proving marketing ROI isn’t just data on a spread-
sheet. It’s at the very core of good marketing. To ensure success,
develop a plan to reach the following milestones:
Define objectives
Successful marketing departments organize processes to take
advantage of key performance indicators within a sales-oriented
organization. They tap into the ubiquitous results-oriented mindset
present in c-level executives by crafting a plan rich in objective-based
measurements.
Optimize through technology
Marketers further the success of their programs through a strong
understanding of the optimization process and effective use of technol-
ogy. They recognize that there is no single measurement methodology
that can provide all the answers surrounding marketing impact or budget
allocation. Instead of searching for the silver bullet, they incorporate a
combination of diverse measurement, research and analytic techniques
to gain better insight into the decisions marketers are called on to make
daily. Marketing automation platforms allow for accurate ROI reporting
without bias, providing executives clear visibility into marketing’s
successes and overall contributions to the company’s business goals.
Change corporate culture
Establishing the value of an organization’s marketing activities is not
just a “nice to have,” but is imperative for corporate survival. ROI
marketing results in the elimination of marketing activities that are costly
and inefficient. Its implementation can create a new corporate culture
in which marketing decisions are based on rigorous analysis and testing
rather than gut feel and guesswork.
Moving from an activity-based marketing department to one based
on generating proven results is not something that can be accomplished
quickly. Begin by focusing on instilling an ROI mind-set within your own
department, and then spread that understanding and commitment
throughout the organization.
 VIII

Lead-Management
Optimization Exercises
[ Proving the Value of Your Marketing Program ]
Top marketers today must do more than create brilliant campaigns that generate leads; they must de-
liver measurable results that justify budgets and clearly demonstrate the value they provide. The following
questions will help you move from activity- to objectives-based marketing and demonstrate the value your
programs bring to your business.

Objectives for the Marketing ROI Exercises:

Gain Support for Results-Oriented Marketing at the C-Level
• Measure the results that will sell management. Define marketing ROI and obtain c-level agreement by
crafting a plan rich in objective-based measurements.
Align Marketing and Sales
• Agree on definition of what constitutes a “qualified lead.”
• Draft a marketing ROI plan and include sales in the thought process.
Create a Closed-Loop Process
• Monitor implementation and identify opportunities for optimization.
• Incorporate ROI findings into the planning process.

Questionnaire to Ascertain Needs

• Define what constitutes the most appropriate measurable, attributable marketing return on
investment for your business _________________________________________
• Obtain C-level and agreement on your definition _________________________
• Obtain agreement on your definition from the sales organization ______________
• Indicate company’s revenue and sales goals:
From new customers _________________
From current customers _______________
• How many new leads are required to meet the marketing-supported sales goal? _____________
• For each marketing campaign, calculate the following in order to identify opportunities to optimize
your marketing program and incorporate ROI findings into the planning process:
Lead-Conversion Rate—The number of sales for a lead source divided by the total number
of leads the source generated. This calculation gives marketers insight into the quality of leads
generated from each source: ___________________________
Time to Conversion—The average amount of time that lapses from when a lead is first
forecast and when it finally converts to a sale. This calculation is useful for identifying trends or
techniques that might shorten the sales cycle and begin generating revenue sooner: _________
Cost per Lead—The cost of the lead source divided by the number of leads generated. This
calculation can help marketers better evaluate results and plan to include high ROI activities in
future campaigns: ___________________________

38 www.vtrenz.com 1-877-484-7704 © 2009 Copyright Silverpop. All rights reserved.

Vtrenz is a registered trademark of Vtrenz, Inc.
 IX

Putting
it all Together
If you’ve carefully followed the strategies and tactics outlined in this workbook, you should have a strong
start on building processes and systems that effectively track and manage leads. You can see how any lead-
scoring system requires careful planning, analysis, and a meeting of the minds between marketing and sales.

Fortunately, powerful solutions have emerged that streamline and automate the lead-scoring process and
give you access to all the components of a lead score together in one platform. For B2B marketers with a
complex sales process, these demand-generation, marketing-automation applications enable users to develop
a thorough, dynamic and measurable lead-scoring process as part of an overall lead-management system.

There are only a handful of solution providers currently in the marketplace. When you incorporate
advanced lead scoring into your lead-marketing strategy, be sure your marketing automation solution and
lead-scoring model can:
• Support the frequency and recency aspects of implicit scoring.
• Automatically factor time decay into recency scores, eliminating the need for manual intervention.
• Impose point maximums on lead scores to minimize the possibility of inaccurately high totals.
• Allow scores to be updated with third-party information such as data appends or data entry
by your sales force.
• Automatically add new data as it is gathered over time and re-score leads.

A strong lead-scoring model brings marketing and sales closer together. The sales team enjoys a flow of
improved leads, and marketing can better monitor its programs and track its successes. As data is collected, the
marketing plan can be tweaked to improve the quality of leads generated, and managing resources becomes
easier and more efficient.
 Lead-management solutions, when combined with a company’s CRM or sales force automation system,
give you the ability to deliver accurate, unbiased ROI reporting. This data is critical to demonstrating market-
ing’s successes and overall contribution to a company’s objectives. When you integrate lead nurturing into
your overall lead-management plan, be sure your marketing automation solution can:
• Continue to nurture leads even after they’ve been handed off to sales.
• Return stalled leads back into ongoing marketing programs for further nurturing.
• Alert sales in real time when leads re-engage or take specific actions that could indicate a
readiness to buy.
• Track sales-accepted follow-up in an automated fashion.
• Track nurture-influenced revenue in order to fully measure the success of your marketing program.

Also, remember that there’s more to proving marketing ROI than displaying a bunch of data on a spread-
sheet. Think of it as the strong core from which you’ll design a powerful marketing platform. To ensure
success, develop a strategy to meet the following goals:
• Define objectives. Take advantage of key performance indicators within a sales-oriented
organization; craft a plan rich in objective-based measurements.
• Optimize through technology. Incorporate a combination of diverse measurements, research
and analytic techniques to gain better insight into the decisions you are called on to make daily.
• Change corporate culture. ROI marketing results in the elimination of marketing activities that
are costly and inefficient, thereby creating a new corporate culture in which marketing decisions are
based on rigorous analysis and testing rather than gut feel and guesswork.

Transitioning from an activity-based marketing department to one focused on generating proven results
takes time to achieve. Start with focusing on instilling an ROI mind-set within your department. Then, share
your knowledge, enthusiasm and commitment with others throughout your organization. Before long, you’ll
have everyone in the company excited about your marketing strategy.

I wish someone had written this book BEFORE we tried to create our own lead-scoring program.

If you have completed the three workbook sections, congratulations! You now have a template and founda-
tion from which to build your own, customized lead-management program. Your demand generation solution
provider should be able to offer you additional assistance and insight.

For more information about lead management and marketing automation solutions, please contact
Silverpop at 1-877-484-7704, or visit us at www.vtrenz.com.

FOOTNOTES

1. “B2B Marketing Needs A Makeover—Now,” Forrester Research, Aug. 2006

2. “What’s the Score?” Research Brief, SiriusDecisions
3. “Demand Generation Automation: Kick Start Your Business,” Aberdeen Group, Sept 2007
4. “Effective Lead Management SAL to SQL,” Research Brief, Sirius Decisions
5. “Predicts 2007: A Return to Growth Fuels Marketing Technology Spending,” Gartner, Nov 2006
6. “Marketing ROI and Measurements Benchmark Report,” Lenskold Group & MarketingProfs.com, 2005
7. The 2004 Forrester/Association of National Advertisers Survey on Marketing Accountability
8. Q1 2007 B2B Marketing Measurement Online Survey, Forrester Research
9. Q4 2006 Marketing Benchmark Online Survey, Forrester Research

40 www.vtrenz.com 1-877-484-7704 © 2009 Copyright Silverpop. All rights reserved.

Vtrenz is a registered trademark of Vtrenz, Inc.