Sales and Marketing UNITE! 3 Ways a Lead-Scoring Strategy Will Connect Your Teams

By: Craig Spooner

The old-timey saying “birds of a feather flock together” often comes to mind when I talk to clients about the importance of implementing a thoughtful lead-scoring strategy. Although sales and marketing are birds of a different feather, they each benefit from the same thing—the close of a sale. So why is it that we so frequently see marketing and sales pointing fingers at one another? The answer is simple: different goals, misunderstood roles, and lack of communication.

In our previous post The Sales vs. Marketing Struggle: Your Prospects Need You Both, we talked about how it has ever been more crucial for marketing and sales to work together to guide their prospects from awareness to decision. In this post, we’ll discuss how aligning your team’s goals and roles will help build a united lead-scoring strategy that will get your teams communicating.

1) Align marketing and sales goals to build the base of your lead-scoring strategy. At the base of any successful lead-scoring strategy are SMART goals. These goals should focus on the actions that prospects can take on your website. Here are a few things to consider during this process:

• What website actions should the marketing team focus on developing to help make the transition from “marketing qualified” to “sales qualified” easier?
• How is marketing nurturing prospects through the funnel? Do you have any marketing automation systems in place to continue delivering content to warm leads?
• What identifiers are in place that will help segment prospects once they become qualified? Do you have form fields set up to segment your buyer personas?
• Are your teams in agreement regarding the criteria that constitutes a marketing qualified lead? (MQL) A sales qualified lead? (SQL) If not, why not?

2) After goals, it’s all about action. Lead-scoring is all about building potential and acting on assumed value. Each action a prospect chooses to take on your site communicates something about what they are interested in and where they are on their journey to purchase, but how much does it matter and who should care? Sales and marketing need to come together to clarify three key things:

• Lead-scoring: What matters the most and what matters the least? Take a trip through your site and analyze all of the ways a prospect could become a qualified lead, then score those actions based on perceived value to both teams. Make sure to review the buyers’ journey, taking each phase into account when you create your scoring template.
• Lead generation metrics: What score turns a prospect into an MQL? SQL? Who needs to be notified when either qualification occurs? What actions do you currently have in place to nurture leads from MQL to SQL?
• Service-level agreements: How long does the sales team have to make contact? What happens if they don’t? If sales recycles the lead, how long does marketing have to respond, and what is their next step? 

Once this conversation has taken place, your teams should be on the same page regarding the development and delivery of MQLs and SQLs to either team. My advice to you is to create a realistic reporting schedule that will entice each team to stay in contact. The more you can connect about website activity and prospect behavior, the better you will understand the wants and needs of your team.

3) After action, we optimize. The easiest part about this whole operation is pushing the “go live” button, but after your lead-scoring strategy goes live, what’s next? OPTIMIZATION! Since sales and marketing cannot function without one another, you have to uncover what’s working and what isn’t, then refine your approach to suit the needs of either team. This isn’t an exercise in seeing who can squawk the loudest. Far from it. This is an opportunity for each team to provide kudos for systems that are working and helpful insights into processes that could use some tweaking. Both teams should come to this discussion with examples of both the good and the bad, and determine what steps they could take to enhance the process.

When marketing and sales can move beyond their differences and align to work in tandem, they have the ability to increase the profitability of their company while cutting the cost of doing business at the same time. A growing, viable company needs marketing to generate, nurture, and score leads (and to develop prospect relationships) just as much as it needs sales to cultivate customer rapport, close deals, and even up-sell and cross-sell. When sales and marketing are in synch, everybody wins!

Thanks for sharing!