Fishers of men...

We can feed someone fish for a day, but if we teach them to fish they eat for a lifetime. As technologist we should make the marketing department fishers of consumers.

Lead scoring is the assignment of a number (score) to a contact determined by the contacts activity. Once the contacts score reaches a certain level they can be handed off as a qualified sales lead. This indicates someone who has been consuming data on your website is possibly interested in more of your products. While setting up scoring and having the initial conversations we found it difficult for some to grasp or visualize the intent and purpose of the scoring.

Scoring is developing workflows that nurture someones interest by taking a journey of well timed and appropriate content depending on their previous actions. In these workflows individual contacts can have media pushed to them depending on their previous response. If you send a newsletter and the person clicks through, then they will move to the next step and receive an invite to customize their profile. If the person clicks through and navigates to another section on your site they receive a coupon for a future purchase, and a link to download that coupon. When they click through that they move to the next level and so on.

I see this as a virtual self guided tour through your website and content. If you were going to sit down with someone and walk them through your website, what would that look like? Now map that out and create a workflow for each phase of that process.

The benefit is a personal engagement with your customer. I know "personal" can be a catch phrase in sales but I believe we don't sell things, and I don't buy things that are sold to me. I buy things I need, and offer solutions to people who are looking for them. The old saying when the student is ready the teacher appears, offers great insight to how we learn. The goal of technology in marketing should be to automate the movement of consumers to students, and at that right moment placing the teacher within arms reach.


Below is a good reference for lead scoring.
http://www.kentico.com/Product/All-Features/Marketing/Lead-Scoring