Lead Qualification Tips

****My last post shared reasons why traditional lead scoring is broken – now I’m going to give you alternative strategies that will help your company grow qualified leads faster without scoring. I recommend reading that post first, but to recap, common challenges include the near-impossible task of assigning accurate point values, the constant need to reset scoring systems after re-calibrating content or processes, and a lack of access to data that can accurately predict future conversion. Moving beyond manual lead scoring refocuses energies on what truly moves the revenue needle – which is creating a steady supply of qualified leads that convert into paying customers. Achieving this is easier if you have a clear picture of who you’re targeting and how you’re going to get them to care about your content and offers to convert.

Strategy 1: Create a nurture machine that produces “Contact Sales” leads

Instead of using lead scoring to generate “ready for sales” leads based on arbitrary scores being reached, be more intentional. Create a journey to nurture new leads that prompts prospects to contact sales (or sign up for a trial). This isn’t as hard as it sounds. You want to target people such as webinar attendees, eBook downloaders, and blog subscribers. These sorts of people are more likely to convert because they’re already signaling interest. The Nurture Machine For perspective, top-performing sales reps win more deals and higher-value deals than their peers by being ruthlessly efficient in qualifying out time-wasting calls, then hustling to ensure they always have 3X - 4X of their quota in pipeline._ They win by building a well-oiled machine. _ When speaking with new prospects or leads, top sales reps always probe for a compelling event that indicates a sale is imminent within a specific timeframe. This might include an upcoming product launch or campaign, a new executive tasked with implementing new technology within a given timeframe, or the impending renewal of an unwanted legacy system. Lead nurturing can turbo-charge the effort to find leads tied to compelling events by creating a situation where buyers have ample opportunity to contact sales and identify themselves as motivated shoppers. To be sure, fishing only for leads who have self-identified that they’re ready for sales, rather than score-based leads may mean you’ll have fewer leads. But at the end of the day, all that matters is revenue and customers. Passing fewer, higher-qualified leads over to sales is more likely to help you reach a higher conversation rate while making your whole organization more efficient. If you’re coming up short against lead targets, you’re best off focusing on launching campaigns to drive new leads than tweaking lead scores to increase less-qualified leads that’ll never convert.

Strategy 2: “Bump up” valuable content to users who show more interest

The less pushy and more valuable your content is, the more likely you are to attract qualified leads while establishing yourself as a trusted resource that buyers will come back to when they’re ready. Remember that only 30% of new leads are ready to buy now, but half of those who aren’t ready to buy today, will be within 12 months. For example, if a customer support manager is planning to implement new helpdesk software next year, they are more likely to return to a vendor who opened their eyes with regular insights like “Winning through a superior customer experience” or “5 ways to avoid failing with your new support portal”, than one who sends a series of useless offers to “touch base”. Or one who drops off the radar entirely, for that matter. Autopilot research found that companies who stay in touch every 2-4 weeks generate 2X the leads, on average, than those who do so less frequently. To create this value, you need to address the buyer’s needs at each stage of their decision-making journey. Then, accelerate or decelerate content delivery (topics, tone, and timing) in response to how actively the reader engages your content. To do so, create:

Top of funnel content: product agnostic thought leadership designed to attract early-stage researchers. If they click or engage, accelerate them to receive…
Middle of funnel content: industry or customer proof points + pragmatic How To’s, relevant to previous content. If the reader clicks or engages this, accelerate them to…
Call to Action content: users have now self-identified by engaging multiple forms of content, so offering a demo request or trial sign up is appropriate and more likely to produce a well-qualified sales lead

Creating a nurture funnel aligns your messaging with your audiences’ interests, increasing your conversion rates while minimizing unsubscribes. You can set nurture on autopilot (sorry, I had to), wait for qualified leads to emerge, and keep filling the funnel. Read on for a deep dive on how to do this.

Strategy 3. Collect qualifying info upfront to route leads efficiently

Many SaaS and E-commerce businesses have both self-service and direct (e.g. call center) sales channels. Consider using information captured from your signup or “contact us” web forms to route new leads. Autopilot and Zendesk lead gen form examples Depending on how your internal sales and customer-facing teams are structured, reference routing criteria might include:

Number of employees (organization size is a good proxy for sales complexity)
Team size (proxy for deal size in seat-based subscription pricing models)
Product interest (proxy for buyer’s level of sophistication and need)
Evaluation status (indicator of need - are they buying now? In 3 months? 6 months?)
Usage or volume metrics (proxy for deal size - number of contacts? volume of data?)

Using Autopilot, you can use form data to trigger a flexible range of follow-up actions. For example, contacts below a certain threshold (e.g. 25 employee company) could be entered into a journey that receive automated emails, group demo offers, and in-app messages, while valuable leads from larger companies could be assigned to sales with a priority task.

Strategy 4. Instantly engage “hot leads” using smart segment triggers

When a contact completes key actions or events, like activating an Enterprise Edition feature, arriving to your site from a VIP referral link, or visiting specific URLs on your website while having high value demographics, instantly add them to a priority Smart Segment. This “added to smart segment” event can trigger a follow up journey that could include outreach emails, in-app messages and text messages, or internal Slack notifications and Salesforce lead assignments. In Autopilot, contacts can be added to Smart Segments based on almost anything, including:

Meeting certain Field Values (which can be permanent or updated by other journeys)
Lists they are on (e.g. “paying customers”) or not on (e.g. “competitors”)
Website visits, form completions, or email clicks
Referring UTMs

Smart segment example in Autopilot For example, you could convert readers of your nurture emails into paying customers by embedding a promo offer within the nurture journey. Ensure rapid follow up by adding users who click a UTM-tagged promo link to a Smart Segment, then tasking your sales team to follow up immediately with contacts who click the “redeem promo offer” link.

Strategy 5. Activate new users faster with helpful in-app and email nudges

B2B and B2C companies focus on delivering a great initial onboarding experience because satisfied customers are more likely to renew, upgrade, and refer the service to friends and colleagues. Successfully onboarded customers have higher lifetime values (CLV). Providing a great experience starts with identifying “aha” moments and key in-app events, like inviting team members, setting up an account, or connecting an app. By integrating your product with Autopilot, either via Autopilot’s API or Segment, you can trigger personalized messages to nudge users into completing key actions at the right time. Example trigger events and actions might be:

a first time user logs in, then doesn’t log back in for three days: email user with a tantalizing pro tip or recommended next step to lure them back
a “slow-starting” user doesn’t complete any actions in their first 48 hours: invite them to join a hands-on product product Q&A and demo
an advanced user progresses quickly learns your product, but mis-configures a key integration: use this fail event to trigger an in-app message that links to a help article outlining ways to fix failed integration issues
a new customer completes all actions in your “new customer quickstart” guide: automatically send them swag and T-shirts to congratulate their achievement

Many SaaS companies like New Relic and Atlassian proactively engage slow starters as well as power users with emails, demo offers, or swag. This approach ensures that customers get the attention they need early on, and provides actionable goals and success criteria, rather than ambiguous scores, for operational teams to focus on and executives to track.

Strategy 6. Use Predictive Lead Scoring to target high likelihood buyers

Finally, predictive lead scoring platforms like Infer, Lattice, or more recently, MixPanel Predict, come much closer to fulfilling the original promise of lead scoring – which is to automatically identify those signals that drive conversion, and rank your contact database accordingly. It’s your statistical wing-man. Using regression-based machine learning, predictive lead scoring continuously crunch thousands of signals, like web activity, data scraped from 3rd party sites, in-app behaviors, demographics, or sales engagement, to determine the impact that each variable (or their interactive effects) have on conversion. Based on historical results, they then predict how likely future leads are to convert who meet similar criteria. While results vary between companies and business models, the models get more refined as time goes on, and the predictive lead score can become an accurate predictor of future paid customers. These insights can be used to create targeted nurture journeys or outreach strategies. Users of Autopilot + Salesforce + Infer, for example, can map predictive Infer scores assigned to Salesforce Leads into Autopilot, then use smart segments to tailor personalized messaging and outreach to “struggling” and “high potential” clients.

Fighting the good fight

Most of the strategies in this post are easy to implement and will deliver results quickly. None depend on lead scoring to qualify for sales engagement, but rather on enticing your audience to engage by delivering valuable content targeted at the right point in their buying lifecycle. By focusing your efforts on producing real inbound leads, by creating nurturing journeys that evolve based on your audience’s level of engagement, by intelligently routing new leads and identifying hot segments based on insights, by proactively engaging based on behavior, and by leveraging new predictive scoring technologies, companies can easily drive the 10% - 20% top-line revenue growth promised by intelligent, personalized lifecycle nurturing.