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Design a Lead Generation Scorecard

Guest post by: Jesse Hopps

Article Overview: “Lead Generation refers to the creation or generation of prospective consumer interest or inquiry into a business’ products or services. Often lead generation is associated with marketing activities, such as cold-calling, targeted at generating new sales opportunities for a company’s sales force. Therefore a “lead” is correctly described as information regarding, or provided by, a consumer that may be interested in making a purchase. “Generation” is one of a myriad of activities that produces contact information and/or interest.” Typical Lead Generation Campaigns

Design a Lead Generation Scorecard



Design a Lead Generation Scorecard

"Lead Generation refers to the creation or generation of prospective consumer interest or inquiry into a business' products or services. Often lead generation is associated with marketing activities, such as cold-calling, targeted at generating new sales opportunities for a company's sales force.

Therefore a "lead"is correctly described as information regarding, or provided by, a consumer that may be interested in making a purchase. "Generation"is one of a myriad of activities that produces contact information and/or interest."

Typical Lead Generation Campaigns

Acquiring leads is the most critical activity within the lead generation process. There are many methods for gathering contact information for prospective consumers.

Following is a brief synopsis of the most common lead generation campaigns:

• Paid Business/Consumer Information: there are many providers of marketing lists and business information, such as Hoovers,Harte Hanks, and Dun & Bradstreet. For a nominal fee, you can download thousands of contact names, and business information to provide your sales force with unqualified leads.
• Contact Center: many organizations have an inside sales team who qualifies leads and generates interest for outside or face-to-face sales representatives. Booking appointments and creating opportunities in a CRM system are the mission-critical activities. Read our report on Making Cold-Calling Work for You to learn best practices for this cost-effective lead generation method.
• Tradeshows & Conferences: attending tradeshows to gather business cards of industry contacts is another common lead generation activity. Use our Tradeshow ROI Calculator to identify which events to attend.
• Webcasts & Whitepapers: read our report Generate Leads with Webcasts to learn how to acquire leads through your corporate website. If you don't have downloadable resources, such as whitepapers, webcasts, or case studies, start gathering contact information from prospects by adding a form to your website.
• Email Marketing/Direct Mail: build a list of prospects by creating a free newsletter on your website, or purchase email addresses from an information source such as an industry association. Periodically, send an email or direct mail to your list and follow up with your inside sales team to book qualified appointments.
• Advertising & Public Relations: to save money on advertising your products/services, leverage PR and promote your business through the press. Read our reports Building Successful PR Campaigns, and Analyzing Competitive Ad vs. PR Spending to learn how to differentiate from your competitors and save money.
• Search Engine Optimization: pull prospects to your website with Google AdWords, or read our report onSimplifying Search Engine Optimization to learn how to increase traffic to your website and capture leads.

Best Practices for Integrating Campaigns

• 1. Centrally Store Prospect Information: it is critical that you have a system to store all your prospects and customer profile information, and can manage interactions with individual prospects based on their interests, activities, and behaviors. Using a MS Excel database can be limiting but is very cost-effective.
• 2. Use Campaign Building Tools: once you have a system with all of your prospect information, you need to segment and refine marketing lists to build campaigns that can be executed across both online and offline lead generation channels. There are a few solutions on the market from vendors such as Eloqua, Manticore Technology,Unica,Salesforce.com, and Pardot .
• 3. Drive Prospects to Website: make every effort to bring prospects to your website where their activities can be tracked and analyzed to capture accurate reporting metrics that demonstrate your performance. Implement Free Web Analytics from Google if your website doesn't currently have any reporting capability.
• 4. Maintain Consistent Messaging: use the same key messages in your Sales Scripts,Sales Presentations , website copy, email and direct mail offers, product literature, tradeshow banners, press releases, and webcasts, to drive home your competitive advantages and key selling points to your targeted audiences.
• 5. Integrate Systems: work with your I/T department to integrate your campaigns into existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or sales force automation (SFA) systems. Build a Lead Scoring system to help your sales team focus on the best opportunities.

Establishing a Lead Generation Scorecard

Creating a Lead Generation Scorecard is a simple method for organizing your strategy. This section will outline the steps required to effectively integrate lead generation campaigns.

• 1. Brainstorm Key Messages:use our Product Positioning Tool to create the key messages that will be communicated within your lead generation activities.
• 2. Dig up Historical Information: track down any previous campaign data such as: email click-thru rates, direct mail responses, contact center metrics, tradeshow results, website analytics, or other measures that can be used as a baseline to compare future results.
• 3. Set Lead Generation Goals & Objectives: your goals may be to increase leads for a particular product, to achieve commitment to core messaging from customer-facing representatives, or to unify your disparate lead generation activities.
• 4. Determine Specific Targets & Actions: this part of your scorecard deals with HOW you are going to achieve your goals & objectives. For example, you may wish to target similar-sized organizations with a product offer.
• 5. Define Measures of Success: like all objectives, you need to determine how success will be measured, BEFORE you kick-off your initiative. These are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will be monitored to demonstrate improvement.
• 6. Establish Goal Timescale: you last step is to break the larger, overarching goals into more manageable pieces. If you are targeting prospects from a tradeshow, create a goal like: "contact each prospective lead no later than 60 days following tradeshow."
• 7. Build your Lead Generation Scorecard: now that you understand each step of the process, use Demand Metric's customizable Lead Generation Scorecard to create your own framework for integrating campaigns.
• 8. Demonstrate Lead Generation Improvement: revisit your Lead Generation Scorecard quarterly and report on the success of your initiatives to senior management.
• 9. Generating a consistent flow of qualified leads is the top priority for marketing professionals in mid-sized enterprises. Gain familiarity with the concept of scorecards to organize your strategies and integrate your lead generation campaigns.
• 10. Based on the best practices described in this report, and tools provided, you should be able to get started with a lead generation program. If you need more clarity, contact your Research Associate who can provide you with more advice.

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Article Tags: business products, consumer interest, generation campaigns, lead generation, prospective consumer, sales opportunities



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