Yesterday I read a post on lead scoring that got me thinking more about how this process progresses.
I like Sirius’ approach in defining 3 major scoring criteria, but I would change the order:
- Demographics – Although I would argue that if the demographics are wrong, they shouldn’t be in the database.
- Behavior -A critical factor, when a suspect downloads a white paper or a demo that needs to trigger alarms.
- BANT – This is an IBM software selling technique – Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline. I’d argue here that the sales guy needs to run with some of this
I’ve thought often about this table of information, but the post above introduced the idea of now scoring for multiple products – add changes over time and you have a full data cube. Who said marketing is a cake job?
There’s also one point not mentioned that is critical – your system also has to automate depreciation. It’s fine to start scoring everyone but if the same system fails to ratchet down the losers, eventually they are going to pile up.
For now, there’s only one way to do it – build it brick by brick. There are many decent tools out there (in fact I think I can see the path to get there as I’m going now), but it takes a lot of field testing to get to an automated system that can handle the load.