There is a lot of discussion about the best practices for lead scoring.  Simply, the best practice is to automate the process.   This may appear at first glance overly-simplistic, however, I suggest you look at your organization and first ask yourself if the process for passing leads to the sales team is fully automated or not.  If it is not fully automated then you are not gathering all the data you can to learn from your prospect and customer interactions.

Once fully automated you first define the current best practices currently implemented.  Understand why they were implemented, where they seem to be working and where they are not.   The rules must be specific to your business, so find a product that guides you through defining the rules, then provides for quick and rapid change once lessons can be learned.

Implement the lead scoring rules and then start to monitor.  Test different outcomes.  Test different results.   Some vendors will state there is one optimized way to deliver lead scoring rules.  They are right in principle, there is one way, but that way is your way not the way their tool works.  Your business is unique in the way it interacts with its customers, and therefore you must understand your business’ specific rules that optimize the chance for converting a prospect to a customer.

Once implemented continue to monitor the rules and improve them.  Your business changes every day, change influenced by new products, new verticals, new pricing, changing macro-economic conditions, new competitors.   Your prospects therefore will change and require a different dialogue to convert them to customers as products mature, prices change and your company expands.  

Lead scoring is one part of Lead Management, Lead Routing is another critical part.   It is not enough to know how to next interact with a prospect, it is essential to know when, why, and to ensure when an instant response is required it is acted on immediately.  Moving the prospect through the dialogue intelligently and engaging them in a conversation dramatically increases the probability for conversion for customer to prospect.

In summary, there is no one way to deliver Lead Management to meet your business’ requirements.  What you need is to automate the process, manage it centrally and consistently using the best practices your business learns as it interacts with more and more prospects.  The best way to deliver fully automated Lead Management is using MarketBright. 

Hi everyone,

Just FYI, our own Dom Lindars will be keynoting the SLAM (Sales, Licensing, Alliance and Marketing)  conference here in San Francisco this week. Dom kicks off the agenda on Thursday (April 3rd) morning, at 8:15am, with a great speech on “The Changing Face of Technology Marketing, and How to Stay Ahead”. 

To register for the event, visit http://www.softwarebusinessonline.com/slam_conf2008_index.php.

The event also features other cool speakers from Salesforce.com, Microsoft, and many more. We hope to see you there!

Marketbright customer GreenRoad Technology was featured in this week’s issue of the DemandGen Report, talking about how Marketbright helped them to quickly and nimbly define their most effective lead-generation programs.

Say Senior Vice President Paige O’Neill - “We chose Marketbright because it was the only solution that combined ease of use, quick implementation and training, and an integration with Salesforce.com—all the functionality we needed to manage the multi-channel email campaigns.”
Check out the full case study here: http://www.demandgenreport.com/articles.php?codearti=1113

“This is the future of the software industry” - Jeremy Burton, CEO, Serena

Check out this CXOToday article on our customer, Serena Software. Serena has seen the benefits of using SaaS (software as a service) within their organization, for sales (salesforce.com) and marketing (Marketbright), and the company is now planning to both expand their use of SaaS products, as well as offer their products in a SaaS model. Congrats guys, we think its a great move, and we’re always happy to hear customers say great things about Marketbright!

http://www.cxotoday.com/India/News/Serena_Software_goes_the_SaaS_Way/551-87332-911.html

Hi guys,

Marketbright will be exhibiting at the Omniture Summit conference at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City, March 4-7th. Come to SLC for the great skiing :-), and stop by our booth to find out why Marketbright is the industry’s most comprehensive, on-demand marketing automation platform out there.

We’ll be in booth 117. Come by and say hello!

http://www.omniture.com/summit08/slc/home?s_cid=1640

One of our customers, Varonis, is featured in this month’s issue of CRM Magazine. Wendy Yale, Varonis’ director of marketing and communications, talks about how her company was able to handle five times more leads, increase marketing activities by a factor of six, and quadruple the number of conversions with the Marketbright solution.

Check out Wendy’s full story here:

http://www.destinationcrm.com/articles/default.asp?articleid=7663

Missed our lead scoring webinar? Now you can view the on-demand version whenever you’d like.

As marketing moves to the web, prospects are becoming more and more wary of providing their personal information for fear of being spammed. Marketing professionals are also optimizing and increasing the number of leads, resulting in a lot of bogus leads cluttering your sales system.

Click here to learn best practices to automate your lead qualification:

http://www.marketbright.com/pages/start/landing-pages-101-on-demand-webinar/index.html?Campaign_Id=13441&Activity_Id=10881

Marketbright CEO Dom Lindars was recently interviewed by StartUp TV. Check it out:

Visit TechWeb

Visit TechWeb

Marketbright, the only on-demand integrated online marketing and web content management platform, will hosted a Webinar on Thursday, January 31st, on Landing Pages 101. Landing Pages have quickly become the 30-second commercial spot of digital marketing, and their importance in tracking pay-per-click (PPC) return on investment and capturing critical lead information cannot be understated.

The webinar was a huge success with many attendees and lost of quesitons and good feedback. In this webinar, we covered:

–  Fundamentals of landing page creation and design

–  Optimization of Google for landing pages

–  Tips and strategies for optimizing landing pages for
    maximum click-through

WHO: Kevin Miller - Director, Client & Business Development

WHAT: Landing Pages 101 - Best Practices for Leveraging Landing Pages

Although the webinar is now in the past, you can access the on demand version by visitin  www.marketbright.com/events
 

From Google: A keyword-targeted ad’s position is based on its ad rank, which is determined by your keyword or ad group’s cost-per-click (CPC) bid times the matched keyword’s Quality Score. To be promoted to a top position above Google search results, your ad must exceed a certain quality threshold, which helps ensure that only the highest quality ads appear in top spots.

Here is a graphic that helps explain this: