Hello fellow Topliners,
I'd like to have a discussion around Sales pushbacks and lead scoring (oh the joys of lead scoring).
We all know the pre-lead scoring drill: sales want more leads, but they don't like the leads they get, so lead scoring is implemented and everyone wins.
How about such post-scoring challenge: now that Sales do like the leads they get from Marketing, they all of a sudden remember that there is a whole lot of leads that did not score and they want to see them all because they think they are all just as good, and lead scoring/marketing is simply "holding back" the leads? So they are starting to reach out and ask to see all the leads from a specific event (for example) - even the ones that didn't score.
So far I've tried:
- Sending all the leads to Salesforce and instructing sales to prioritize and follow-up based on their score
Outcome: some sales were not technical enough to do so and chose to prioritize by title anyway; then set the leads to "disqualified" instead of "nurture", breaking the cycle.
- Sending all the automation-qualified leads to Salesforce; sending the contacts that did not score in a spreadsheet; asking sales to mark up the contacts they want to call on a spreadsheet, then manually pushing them to SFDC and assigning to the rep. Was willing to do that to get information on trends/criteria they used to determine that the leads are "good" AND THEN feedback on whether they were indeed good/interested AFTER they called them so we could improve lead scoring if necessary.
Outcome: spent hours and hours sending the manually marked up leads but got no feedback on why they marked it up or whether they were indeed as good as they thought. Sales understood the importance of it but were busy at first, and then "just forgot which leads where from where".
Lastly, prospects get called before they are ready which can turn them away, as we all know.
This challenge is of course sometimes happenes on an individual-to-individual level - one sales person reaches out, we are having discussions around lead scoring, looking at leads together, you finally win them over and they are convinced that lead scoring works... but what if there are dozens of them? we have the management buy-in, but how do you make these individual reps trust your scoring program?
Any thoughts?
Thank you