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Just because a customer opened your latest email and clicked on a link, it doesn’t mean they’re ready for you to call them.
In the early stages of connecting with your brand, most customers aren’t ready, and don’t want to be contacted by you.
If you jump in too early, you can waste valuable sales resource time and sometimes put the customer off entirely.
The most effective process is to provide customers with plenty of opportunities to get to know your brand, through a marketing nurture campaign, track what they interact with, and contact them at the appropriate time, when they’ve shown an increasing interest in your proposition.
The best way to do this is through Lead Scoring.
It’s a process that indicates a customers interest in your proposition, by attributing a value / score to your marketing activities and content, in relation to how well it will educate a customer on the value of choosing you as a supplier, and then tracking how much content they engage with.
As a customer engages with those marketing actitivies and content, the cumulative score is tracked, so that when the lead scoring target is met (you identify what engagement and corresponding score indicates a “hot” lead) you know it’s a “hot” lead to pass into your sales team.
Now here’s how to do it.
- Design a campaign with suitable marketing activities to nurture your customers in the early stages of your Customer Journey;
- Give each activity a weighted value/score out of 100, to show how valuable it is in the nurturing process;
- Identify which activities a customer needs to engage with, to show a level of interest that would justify you calling them;
- What is the cumulative score if the customer engaged with the minimal level of activities to justify a call? This is your lead scoring target;
- Track customer interactions and their lead score;
- Pass the “hot” leads into your sales team when they hit the lead scoring target.
If you work with sales stages, the customer would move from a status of “Lead” to a status of “Opportunity” when the lead scoring target is met. Typically, this is also the point at which the sales department takes ownership of the customer from the marketing department in terms of the sale, but don’t forget, the marketing team still has a huge role to play in supporting the sales team and managing the customer relationships ongoing.