The Problems with Lead Scoring
B2B marketers that are still using lead scoring to hand off leads are doing their sales teams and themselves a huge disservice. Let’s dig into why.
- Sales gets involved with a potential deal late in the buying cycle. By the time sales is sent a qualified lead, the prospect has already researched your offering on your website, filled out a form, and taken enough of the right actions to hit your lead scoring model criteria without having sales help the prospect.
- Lead scoring only measures an individual’s behavior. Sales sells to an entire account, so knowing what actions one person on the buying committee has taken is not enough. Even worse, lead scoring ignores decision-makers who are much less likely to complete a form — for example, C-level executives. To better assess interest, you need to provide your sales team with account-level insight and not rely on form completions.
- Lead scoring is hard to set up and maintain. Every time you add a new key piece of content or engagement point, you need to figure out how many points or minutes to give to that experience and then adjust your overall scoring threshold. Inevitably, you fall behind and the scoring model becomes unreliable.
As Bryan Brown, one of the early product pioneers of lead scoring said, “Lead scoring has reached its expiration date.”
Even though lead scoring is flawed, marketers — especially those doing ABM — are generating a ton of valuable data from their campaigns. Unfortunately, it’s hard to deliver this data in a concise and actionable way.
It should be simple. Sales needs to know when an account is interested in your offering (i.e., when an opportunity might be developing). They need to know what your marketing team is doing to build awareness and engagement, and be confident that any account they engage is aware of your solution.
Today, I’m excited to share a solution to the lead-based madness. I’d like to introduce you to Sales Insights powered by Engagement Spike (formerly Account Surge). Now, sales and marketing teams can easily leverage account engagement data to prioritize and personalize outreach to the hottest accounts.
Learn more in our webinar where marketing and sales practitioners share how they use Sales Insights to generate more pipeline and win more deals. Sign up here.
Introducing Sales Insights Powered by Engagement Spike
Sales Insights delivers account engagement data, Engagement Spike alerts, and digital advertising results from the Terminus ABM platform into Salesforce. Your sales team can now:
- See how marketing is driving engagement via Terminus account-based advertising.
- Get a clear signal when an account is actively researching their offering.
- Personalize outreach based on an account’s browsing behavior.
Unlike alerts from marketing automation, Sales Insights aggregates engagement at the account level from anonymous web traffic, allowing salespeople to identify engaged accounts earlier. Sales Ingishts uses algorithmic account engagement scoring to alert sales when an account is actively researching your solution.
For marketers who are managing an ABM program, Sales Insights makes it easy to coordinate marketing and sales outreach to the most engaged target accounts. It also makes monitoring and reporting on the success of Terminus account-based advertising campaigns a snap within Salesforce. The algorithmic engagement scoring model makes setup and maintenance simpler than lead scoring yet provides more a more reliable signal of interest.
Sales Insights provides valuable data on the account object in Salesforce. It shows:
- Engagement Spike Data: Sales should use Engagement Spike to prioritize accounts. See when an account is showing a spike in engagement, their spike percentage, and spike heat. Engagement Spike shows when an account is interested in your product based on a spike in engagement with your most valuable content. Learn more about Engagement Spike in this blog post.
- Account Web Engagement Data: Terminus tracks anonymous web traffic and identifies it by account using our Visitor ID technology. Since most of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally, this data provides your sales team insight into how engaged an account is without requiring a form fill.
- Web Behavior: See which webpages were most visited by an account. This allows salespeople to personalize their outreach and have more fruitful conversations.
- Account-Based Advertising Performance: See the results of your Terminus display advertising campaigns for each account, including the number of ad impressions and clicks for each account over a 30- and 90-day period. With this data, sales reps can be confident that marketing has driven awareness and engagement with their accounts.
With all this data at your fingertips, you can also automate Terminus account-based advertising. For example, when an account has a recent spike in engagement, Terminus can remove the account from existing ad campaigns and trigger a new LinkedIn campaign for that account.
With out-of-the-box reporting in Salesforce, Sales Insights provides the data that sales leaders need to ensure their teams are engaging with the hottest accounts. It’s easy to automate data-driven alerts to ensure that sales is acting quickly on new insights. All in all, it makes aligning marketing and sales around the right accounts at the right time easy and more effective.
Sales Insights is now available at no additional cost to all Terminus customers. To learn more about Sales Insights and how we use it internally at Terminus, join our webinar on August 2.
