Issue link: https://resources.demandgen.com/i/852988
Learn more about DemandGen's services www.demandgen.com | main: 925.678.2500 | sales: 925.678.2511 | info@demandgen.com © 2015 DemandGen International, Inc. All rights reserved. DemandGen and the DemandGen logo are registered trademarks of DemandGen International. All other product and company names may be trademarks of their respective owners. 2 down in the buying cycle, the content should be much more personalized, much shorter and to the point. It's not likely that you're going to be able to repurpose campaign content that you're using at the top of the funnel. Q: What was your goal in defining lead stages and how does that drive your nurturing strategy? A: The goal was to determine how we would treat each lead through the nurturing and discovery process. We documented who owns the lead at each stage, what action they're responsible for, who controls the conversation and the type of message and call to action we want to have at each level. We plotted the different lead types on a grid to determine how to treat them. Q: How does lead scoring come into play in your nurturing strategy? A: Our scoring program is really the heart of the system. It determines the lead rating which ultimately defines ownership, action and nurture. We collect explicit data from forms and other sources that give us a qualification rating. Criteria such as contact function, role, company size, industry, a determine the qualification score (A, B, C) which correlates to their need. We combine that with a score that reflects interest level which is based on their behavior. We look at how many times they visit the website, the campaigns they respond to, attendance at high value events and rate them with an interest score which tells us if the prospect is hot, warm or cold. Our lead scoring program sorts prospects into very specific buckets and pushes them down a pre-determined nurturing: Suspects: B and C leads that are cold or warm – marketing owns these and cultivates them through nurturing until they are hot (or sales ready); Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL): A and B leads that are warm or hot, plus all hot C leads – these go to the inside sales team for follow up, in conjunction with targeted nurturing designed to software the prospecting call. At this point, we understand the buyer's interest, industry, company size, so we are able to tailor the message and call to action to them personally; Sales Qualified Leads (SQL): A leads that are hot – these have been further qualified by inside sales and are passed to the field sales team for follow up. These leads also get nurtured but now rather than trying to qualify and discover, we are building preference to support the field's efforts in converting these leads into opportunities. Q: So scoring takes care of sorting prospects into the right bucket. Can you explain exactly how those leads then get nurtured? A: We actually have 30+ nurture programs that run daily. Lead scoring takes care of figuring out where each prospect should go and then we have a specific set of content and a workflow for each nurture program based on the type of lead. In addition to nurturing the A, B and C leads depending on if they are hot, warm or cold, we also run programs to prospects in our database that fall outside those ratings.