Lead Scoring and Nurturing

Lead volume isn't the only thing that counts; lead quality is equally important. Most marketers today recognize that their marketing programs' success will ultimately be evaluated by the sales force and executive management not according to the total number of leads, but by the revenue dollars brought in. Ensuring that leads convert into promising opportunities with real sales potential is a function of properly evaluating and managing every lead that comes in.

Lead qualification and scoring plays an important role in aligning marketing and sales, enabling marketers to pass only viable, pre-screened, high-quality leads to the sales force. But savvy marketers also know there's no such thing as a useless lead—while leads may be at different points in the prospect lifecycle, and the potential for a sale may seem distant at first, any lead that has expressed interest in your offerings is worth continuing to "work." Cost-effective lead nurturing programs offer the ability to continue to cultivate colder leads without expending salesperson effort, while also ensuring leads with future sales potential aren't discarded.

CDC MarketFirst enales marketers to score, manage, and nurture leads quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively:

  • Score leads with precision: CDC MarketFirst enables marketers and salespeople to set mutually agreed-upon lead qualification and ranking criteria and implement a lead-scoring system based on these rules. Marketers can then define tailored lead-qualification questions and integrate them into CDC MarketFirst campaigns. When leads come in through these campaigns, they are instantly scored and ranked according to these custom criteria.
  • Initiate automatic action based on lead quality: Marketers can set CDC MarketFirst's rule-based engine to distribute hot leads instantly to the sales force and enroll colder leads into specific automated nurturing programs based on their qualification-question answers.
  • Distribute leads immediately to the right salesperson: For hot leads that merit live salesperson follow-up, CDC MarketFirst's advanced rule-based engine can be set to follow sophisticated lead-assignment rules, assigning leads instantly to the right salespeople based on territory, product, lead source, expertise, sequence, or other factors. This ensures no unfairness, error, or delay in lead distribution.
  • Continue to cultivate colder leads—effortlessly: With CDC MarketFirst, marketers can set up streams of regular nurturing communications to maintain contact with colder leads without requiring salesperson intervention. These streams continue to cost-effectively educate and market to the prospect over time. At any point, the prospect can indicate increased interest or changed status through the campaign prompts and be escalated to a warmer lead status, which could enroll them in a different nurturing stream or route them to a live salesperson as appropriate.