CRM - October 2008 - (Page SF9)

Sponsored Content October 2008 9 Silverpop Vtrenz and Salesforce.com: A POWERFUL COMBINATION FOR LEAD SCORING AND ROI For any company with a sales force, defining what comprises a “hot lead” can be a struggle. While the marketing department happily tosses to sales everyone who downloads a white paper or registers for a Webinar, sales may consider such prospects to be unqualified and unworthy of their time. Or worse, they dutifully follow up on every lead, chasing down prospects without the budget, authority or even interest in purchasing the company’s products or services. Silverpop has built its success on understanding the needs of sales and marketing and providing the technologies to solidify relationships and improve lead management. Integration capability to a CRM solution plays an important role in ensuring that marketing and sales stay in alignment. With a bi-directional, real-time, flow of data between Vtrenz and Salesforce.com, both sales and marketing are kept in synch on each other’s efforts, providing both sides clear visibility into all actions regarding a prospect. This allows for more effective and relevant communication, resulting in a more positive and meaningful customer experience. Qualifying leads through a comprehensive lead-scoring model can alleviate concerns over lead quality. When scoring criteria are 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 return-on-investment with limited effort. WHY TOP BTOB MARKETERS USE LEAD SCORING One of the biggest challenges companies face is the inability to touch all prospects in a timely manner. So if a hot lead is in the queue, it could take too long for sales to reach it before a competitor whisks it away. Lead scoring is a method of assigning points to different criteria for each lead that flows into your marketing organization. It allows you to rank and prioritize leads and determine the likelihood of each becoming a customer. Based on a lead’s score, it will either be routed to sales or continue to be nurtured by marketing. By providing sales with leads that exhibit criteria indicating they are ready to buy, sales can engage in meaningful conversations with prospects rather than spending time chasing down cold opportunities. QUALITIES OF A GOOD LEAD SCORING MODEL Taken together, explicit and implicit factors create a total picture of your prospects that enables you to make an accurate determination of their propensity to buy. As the lead score of a prospect changes based on behavior, the changing score can trigger re-routing based on predefined rule sets. Hot leads can be automatically flagged in Salesforce.com to alert sales for immediate follow-up. And because the processes are automated, sophisticated demand management systems can take much of the resource burden off marketing. POWERFUL LEAD SCORING ALSO ACCOUNTS FOR RECENCY AND FREQUENCY 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. The most accurate lead scoring models comprise both explicit and implicit information. • EXPLICIT SCORES ARE BASED ON INFORMATION PROVIDED BY OR ABOUT THE PROSPECT—COMPANY SIZE, JOB TITLE, GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION, ETC. Beyond simply measuring behavior, a powerful lead scoring program must also account for the recency and frequency of the behavior—how often and how recently a person took an action. Any good sales rep knows that the quality of a lead changes both over time and as more or less interaction with the prospect occurs. For instance, consider the difference between a prospect who takes a product demo today and another who took it six months ago. The behavior is the same, but the person who most recently took the demo clearly is more likely to be in an active phase of the buying cycle. In another example, a prospect who visited your Web site 10 times this month is clearly more engaged than someone who has visited just once. LEAD SCORING DELIVERS RESULTS— AND ROI • IMPLICIT SCORES ARE DERIVED FROM MONITORING PROSPECT BEHAVIOR—WEB SITE VISITS, WHITE PAPER DOWNLOADS, EMAIL OPENS AND CLICKS, ETC. For many reasons, marketers struggle to justify expenditures and prove ROI: data isn’t easily accessible, a multitude of programs complicate the ability to tie results to specific campaigns, and measurement is often a time-consuming manual process. Silverpop Vtrenz has identified this frustrating cycle and has created the first solution in the marketplace to provide fully http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - October 2008

CRM - October 2008 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality�Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Sprinting Toward Disaster? SAP�Retains Market-Share Lead in�CRM A�Week of Strong Customer�Service CRM�on Twitter Build a Good Event and They Will Come Required Reading There's No Place Like Home The New Breed of CRM�Consultant The Price is Right...You Hope How Much Marketing is Too�Much? The�Sweet Smell of High-Quality�Service The Next Act! For An Acquisition Some Stories Never Get Old CRM�Eases the Pressure For WIKA�Instruments Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Scouting Report Pint of View

CRM - October 2008

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