Explore Lead Qualification Models
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify common lead qualification considerations.
- Create a lead qualification model utilizing Account Engagement features.
- Explain steps to create a lead qualification model given a scenario.
Lead Qualification Considerations
Lead qualification is critical to maximizing time spent on each prospect. If you can identify ideal prospects, create personalized marketing content, and nurture the prospect to close, then you’re doing great. Getting a lead qualification system in place, however, can be a little confusing. Here are some tips to help get you started.
When thinking about a lead qualification model for your company, there are many things to consider. Each company has different objectives, audiences, and budgets. Despite the differences, there are some similarities across models that you should consider when building your own model.
- Qualified leads should be assigned to your sales reps, either on a round-robin basis or based on territories, industries, or other traits of the prospect. Once the leads are assigned to sales users, their prospect record will sync with Salesforce.
- Lead assignment can be performed via page actions, completion actions, automation rules, or by assigning them manually from within their prospect record.
- Deciding when to assign prospects to sales reps and sync them to Salesforce varies based on your sales cycle and strategy. Criteria to determine if a lead is qualified may include:
- Score: You can set a threshold score that determines the lead has reached a level of activity that suggests they could be a potential customer.
- Grade: If you have a specific type of customer that your company typically sells to, grading your prospects based on their prospect fields will be the best way to determine if they are a good fit for your product or service. Common fields to base grades on include industry, company size, job title, and so forth.
- Form completion: While just any form completion may not be the best indicator of the lead’s intent, you may have a form for demo requests or to learn more about your product/service. Upon form completion, notify the sales rep who will be assigned so they can familiarize themselves with the lead beforehand.
How Does Account Engagement Fit In?
So how does Account Engagement help your lead qualification efforts? One of the biggest benefits of marketing automation is the ability to automatically qualify leads. Let’s go back to our friends at Get Cloudy. If you recall, it is a consulting firm that specializes in Salesforce implementations around Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Communities. Let’s say Get Cloudy offers corporate training in addition to its consulting services. Get Cloudy wants to identify companies that are larger than 100 people and have a VP of learning and development or senior HR leader. So Get Cloudy would set up the following criteria.
- If the prospect field Job Title = VP of learning and development or senior HR leader or contains HR, then increase the prospect’s grade by one letter.
- If the prospect field Company Size is 100 or more, then increase the prospect’s grade by a half letter grade.
While there are several examples of how Account Engagement can help with lead qualification at your company, here are a few of the most important ways Account Engagement can help Get Cloudy.
Lead Capture
First, Get Cloudy needs to utilize lead capture in ways, such as using forms, to gather basic information about potential leads, such as company size. This information is captured within Account Engagement. Once the lead submits their email address, they become a prospect. Then all data gathered about email opens, link clicks, downloads, and so on, are synced to their record. Get Cloudy can track all the interactions within Account Engagement to start targeting the emails, whitepapers, and other content to the leads.
Prioritize Prospects
Prioritizing prospects is a key aspect of lead qualification because it helps identify the most sales-ready prospects in your database. It allows the sales team to focus on leads with higher engagement improving conversion rates. Get Cloudy implements lead scoring rules based on engagement metrics. Scores are assigned to various engagement activities, and thresholds are set to identify highly engaged leads. Automated workflows trigger actions based on lead scores, and once they reach the thresholds, they’re automatically assigned to a sales rep.
Create Targeted Messaging
Using both lead score and lead grade helps focus your messaging by providing a more comprehensive picture of your prospects. While lead scores and lead grades look at different factors, when you join them together, you’re evaluating the total value of each potential prospect. Prospects that have a below-average interest are more engaged with focused messaging on additional product features and other marketing content that aligns with their interest.
Scoring and grading can be joined together by combining an increasing score (estimate of interest) and increasing grade (estimate of potential fit) to find your ideal prospect. This benefits both sales and marketing by prioritizing prospects, creating targeted messaging, and adding prospects whose grade and score combination lands them in the orange zone above to a less resource-heavy engagement program.
Add Prospects to Engagement Programs
Typically, prospects or leads with lower scores or grades get added to Engagement programs to help nurture their interest. This may be for a variety of reasons and because of that, they may be added to a different engagement program based on their interactions with your company. Engagement Studio is a great feature to use for this exact scenario: nurturing prospects who are not quite ready for sales.
By implementing Marketing Cloud Account Engagement for lead qualification, Get Cloudy can streamline its sales process, increase conversion rates, and build more meaningful relationships with high-potential prospects/leads.