Eloqua Marketers are capturing a massive amount of Digital Body Language™. This data can provide Sales with additional insight beyond carbon-based activity & notes stored in the CRM.
What is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring is an objective ranking of one sales lead against another. Lead scoring helps your marketing and sales teams identify where a prospect is in the buying process and the right follow-up.
Marketing and sales develop a lead scoring model collaboratively by defining what makes up a good lead. With a clear definition of a good lead, your organisation can use a lead score to send the right leads to sales and identify leads that need further nurturing.
When leads sent to sales have an objective ranking, it is easier to measure how good your sales team is at engaging prospects and closing business.
How can Sales use a Lead Score?
When you have hundreds or even thousands of people identified as Leads or Prospects, trying to draw out those with a higher propensity to buy can be a challenge.
Lead Scoring allows you to do this, or you could say Eloqua does it for you. The Eloqua Lead Score Model will assign a “score” to each unique person based on a pre-determined range of values you built into the model.
What do we mean by Digital Body Langauge™?
It can be challenging for sales to identify and meaningfully understand customer motivations because oftentimes multiple decision-makers and a relatively small number of target accounts characterise the typical B2B purchase.
Digital Body Language is the online equivalent of the facial expressions revealed during negotiating discussions.
How should Sales engage with Prospects when working with a Lead Score?
This will largely depend on the objective of the Lead Score model, keep in mind you can have multiple Lead Score Models running at the same time.
The key is for Sales and Marketing to agree to define a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is. For example, if the Lead score is A1, A2, B1 or B2 is that an MQL?
Tips for the Sales Team
- Don’t rush the process. If you’ve worked with marketing to define a Lead Score Model, you’ve agreed what defines an MQL. Reaching up into the funnel to pull contacts into a buying cycle may work against you if they’re not ready.
- Make time to review Eloqua Profiler. Look at which emails your prospect is opening and more importantly, clicking on. Which website pages are they viewing – what are those website pages talking about? By understanding the content they’re engaging with you can better understand their interests. Are they just a “tyre kicker” or does their behaviour imply a readiness to buy?
- Your feedback is important to improve the accuracy of Lead Scoring. When an MQL arrives in the CRM it’s important that you select a reason code* should you need to reject the Lead. Or, should the Lead progress to an Opportunity but you have to select Closed/Lost, a reason code should be assigned to the Opportunity.
- Before you create a lead scoring model in Oracle Eloqua, you will want marketing and sales teams to define the best criteria to look for when assessing the quality of leads. You will want to define both the ideal profile and the qualities of a good lead. Scoring every lead means that you will know when to take action, which can help turn a poor lead into a better one.
*NOTE: Reason Codes can be built into the Lead and Opportunity management process of most CRM platforms. They usually require a Workflow that forces the CRM user to select a reason the Lead has been rejected or the Opportunity has been Closed/Lost, from a pre-defined list of values. e.g. “Not ready to buy”, “No Budget”, “Lost to competitor”, “No decision” etc. This feedback is incredibly valuable to Marketing as they refine the Lead Score Model and build out their content strategy.
How do Sales view a person’s Digital Body Langauge™ and their Lead Score?
These two screenshots show Eloqua Profiler accessed from your desktop browser and on mobile. Your Eloqua Administrator can help with access to Profiler. It can also be embedded in most CRM platforms at the Lead and Content level.
The Lead Score is visible above, it’s the green button with B1. You can adjust this to display a Lead Score that is relevant to this person as needed.
Eloqua Profiler is easily made available to Sales from within these major CRM providers and others.
Do you have questions about how Lead Scoring can help?
Contact us today and have a chat with our Sales team.
They’re also familiar with many Eloqua customers using Lead Scoring, Digital Body Langauge™, and Eloqua Profiler to help them understand their buyer better, so they can engage in a more pro-active and informative way instead of being another phone call from a salesperson.
