I’ll start with an example. A couple of years ago, a company approached us with a single, clear requirement – the marketing team wanted 150 BANT qualified leads within 6 months. (BANT is shorthand for a decision-maker who has a defined Budget, the right level of Authority, a clear Need for the solution, and a Timescale for the project.)

This kind of detailed qualification is often important when dealing with ‘commodity’ purchases and is increasingly used when trying to industrialise the handover between Marketing and Sales (often the case with marketing automation systems). But in this example, the BANT qualification was being applied to multi-million pound IT programmes, and it’s a great illustration of the kind of issues facing lead scoring and qualification for complex B2B sales.

Where’s the downside of handing over a lead when it gets to the ‘BANT’ stage?

Well, if you have a high-value proposition – or if you have a commodity proposition but want to shift to a value-sell – then by the time they reach this stage, the prospect will probably already have been working with one of your competitors to define their needs and a potential solution. There’s every chance you’ll be making up the numbers at RFP stage and Sales or Business Development will have an uphill battle to prove your competitive value.

If you really talk to Sales leaders in these businesses, they usually want a broader mix of opportunities for their teams. It’s good to have some highly qualified leads (less time to the potential close, less effort required, very useful to give to new people in the sales team), but it’s also important to have the earlier stage pipeline too (often these become the biggest value deals as they have the chance to work with the prospect to define the solution, and for a similar reason they can have a higher conversion rate once they become competitive).

If you’re handing leads over manually to Sales, this isn’t too complex. Have an honest conversation about what kind of organisations they’re most interested in (or analyse existing customer information if you have the opportunity to get more scientific!), what kind of people they talk to early in deals, and what the signs are that they are interesting to take further. Then talk through leads as they are handed over to refine the picture of what makes a good or bad early-stage opportunity.

There are two main challenges that we see when using automation to hand over early-stage opportunities:

1. Setting up marketing automation scoring or lead ranking with a model to flag likely prospects at an earlier stage where you’re able to shape the deal. The scoring models will probably need frequent adjustment based on feedback from Sales, but the general idea is to score based on activity (how frequently a person has responded or accessed what kinds of information in how short a timeframe) as much as specific information (e.g. job roles or budgets). Looking for related information, I found this great story on Eloqua’s blog (”But What if I Want to Follow Up on ‘D’ Leads?“) with another angle on why sales people want access to early stage leads and how difficult it is to get lead scoring right. It’s exactly these kind of human factors that muddy the waters of automation.
2. Supporting joint working between Sales and Marketing. It’s inevitable that if you are trying to uncover earlier stage opportunities, then some (however good your lead scoring) won’t be right for Sales to keep hold of. Which makes it very important that they can hand prospects back into the Marketing process (avoiding the infamous leaky funnel). It’s another argument for tighter integration of Sales and Marketing people and systems.

It’s still all about the marketing, not just about the systems…

But actually, the bigger marketing challenge is a counter-intuitive one and doesn’t relate to systems or automation at all. Earlier stage leads are often simply harder to engage with than BANT qualified ones. Once they have a budget and project timescales, people tend to be more willing to give up their time to talk to relevant suppliers and are busy searching online for information. But if you’re looking for the opportunity to raise a potential issue with a prospect before they’ve properly defined a solution, then you really need good ammunition delivered in the right way to make a successful claim on their time.

The best marketing automation system, with the most appropriate nurture tracks and lead scoring, is nothing without the content, targeting and proposed next step that can bring the next opportunity to life.

We’ve been reviewing recently our most successful lead management and lead nurturing programmes, looking at what it took to make them successful and the key steps in setting them up. (For a view on the benefits these programmes have to offer, see this previous post on lead nurturing strategies/target benefits.)

Alongside a more detailed set of critical success factors, our review suggested 4 key attributes essential for creating lead management programmes (each then breaks down into several competence questions in a kick-off process):

1. Detailed knowledge of the business objectives and capabilities/needs of different teams in the business/external partners
2. Insight into target individuals, their typical needs and decision/purchase journeys
3. Expertise in the strategies, content, and hooks that drive forward the audience journeys
4. Working understanding of the technologies of lead management, nurturing and CRM (technology must not come first, but understanding the different capabilities of Eloqua vs Silverpop vs Oracle vs Marketo vs Aprimo vs Neolane vs Microsoft Dynamics vs Salesforce etc etc will ensure rapid time to value)

Only by balancing these 4 factors is it possible to take the 4 actions necessary to build the best performing programme (while these 4 are distinct and each have several sub-actions, they can’t be treated in isolation as each has an impact on the other):

1. Identify areas of potential for greatest business impact from lead management (and set the right targets/measures)
2. Correctly set the process and scoring for management/handover of different levels of opportunities and for management/improvement of ‘marketing’ data in the nurturing process
3. Design the right journeys, create enticing content (or ‘wrap’ existing content), identify appropriate triggers/personalisation opportunities
4. Select the best areas to launch the programme, implement rapidly and scale up appropriately

It would be interesting to hear if anyone has spotted any other headline factors responsible for lead management success…

Forrester’s recent research (’How Managing Leads Pays Off In A Stronger, More Qualified Pipeline‘ – registration required) makes for interesting reading. Sponsored by marketing technology vendor Silverpop, the research is based on interviews with 15 senior B2B marketers in the US.

The interviewees paint a consistent and compelling picture of what lead management can deliver:

• Healthier pipelines (both better qualified and higher in volume as more leads are nurtured through to opportunities)
• More accountable marketing (consistently planned, measuring the right things and drawing out valuable intelligence)
• Greater efficiencies (more re-use of content, smarter contact strategies, less blanket comms)
• More appropriate communications (a better experience for customers and prospects)

What’s particularly refreshing (for a paper sponsored by a technology provider) is how much emphasis is given to getting the lead management and content creation process right before selecting the technology platform to use.

It’s exactly as we’ve seen across long term lead nurturing and relationship programmes – the technology is essential (whether that’s Salesforce or Siebel, Eloqua or Silverpop or even just Excel) but there are so many other factors that need to be considered first:

• Building the necessary alignment with sales
• Setting valid goals and designing the overall process
• Understanding the audience (to reach them, meet their needs, and score them)
• Creating the content that will make a difference to the audience
• Designing the campaign components to distribute the content (and mapping these into communication flows that take contacts on the right journey)
• Defining how issues like data quality and sales handover (in both directions) will be managed in the ongoing programme

After all of these (and there are several useful models to consider in the report), comes the right technology solution. There’s rarely just a single answer – far more often it comes down to the ability to integrate different platforms to make the desired process possible.

One major element that the report begins to highlight is the importance of the human factor. In our experience, there are very few processes that can be fully automated – this is where the ideal lead management process needs to account for things like efficiently handling inbound responses and making the most of opportunities for personal interaction like initial sales workshops. Above all,  it demands a new skill-set from B2B marketers to conceive, deliver and operate a lead management process.