Are there activities by potential customers that cause them to bypass your marketing automation lead scoring process and go directly to highly qualified status?

I agree with Kevin: this is a separate status, and these are often the most important people to detect early. They need immediate intervention.

I think your question points out a problem with many of the lead scoring approaches...they tend to take a fairly linear and heuristic path: each action adds to the score, and scores are often determined by subjective criteria. So once the score reaches a certain threshold, a lead is promoted. Unfortunately, the notion of the sales "funnel" leads to this linear concept and does not recognize that prospects are circulating in and out (and within) the funnel.

We view this differently, in that we consider everyone one to be in a "state," and prospects potentially can move between any state to another: they can even go to less qualified states. One nice thing about this general approach is that there are very mature and powerful statistical methods (e.g. Markov models) that can be used to place people in the right state for further nurturing or for a rep call.

The other challenge is, as you put it, is trying to guess what activities are important to indicating this fast-track behavior. Again, I think many of the current offerings take an approach that is too simple (and that ironically forces a lot of additional complexity).

Here's a very simple example: I see two prospects, who each do the same "right" things, respond, download, look at pricing, etc, but one works for Costco and another is the owner of Bob's Quickie Mart. If my clients are Fortune 1000 companies (as Fulcrum's are), then Bob is not qualified. If my reps market to local convenience stores, he is highly relevant.

Scoring engines should be able to use *all* of the information I have in order to promote prospects. I am not saying that some cannot do a good job of using data, but again many have a naive, linear view of what qualifies someone.

Thanks for the good question.

David King
http://blog.fulcrum-mktg.com

Speaking: When I speak my funnel is so much shorter; or it's instantaneous. I remember the first time I spoke and two people paid 1K each for a program I was going. When I did my "lessons learned" that night I realized that besides an audiance of 50 people, there were many more well-established business owners in the audiance. Now that's what I look for.

Hi Lindsey -

In short; YES - there are activities that should send a lead directly to highly qualified status. The trick is defining them. Here's how we do it:

We collect every activity a contact does, from requesting something on the website to later visiting specific product pages. We also collect every activity a sales rep makes against that contact (sales calls, emails, etc.) and all automated "touches" made through our marketing automation like emails, opens, clicks, etc. We then append the contact record with any demographic and firmagraphic infomation we can find. After collecting and collecting we run all of that data through our CapitalIze(tm) product, which is a branded name for a statistical analysis tool known as genetic modeling.

Unlike CHAID or other types of predictive modeling, genetic modeling uncovers complex relationships among data sets. Randomization is used to generate infinite possible combinations of predictor variables. It is a self-refining model that runs up to one million times to arrive at the optimal scoring and lead nurturing models, determining the most important variables to consider when scoring a lead. The output of the exercise is a real scoring algorithm that is applied to your lead management or marketing automation tool to trigger sales lead alerts at exactly the right time.

There's more info here: http://www.marketnetservices.com/solutions/advanced-lead-nurturing.aspx

And I'm working on a white paper that will be released soon. Let me know if you'd like to receive a copy!

Jennifer
www.marketnetservices.com
www.noleadleftbhind.com

You highlight a growing issue with Marketing Automation Programs and one that's causing an aggregate problem for sales in that the #of hot/qualified leads is growing and as sales connects they find their not so hot in their perception. So in many cases its back the future.

While intrinsic scoring is interesting its still in its infancy in my view but there is a growing perception across marketing professionals with these systems that because a lead has lots of activity and results in a high intrinsic score it directly relates to a "hot" or highly qualified lead and can by pass the traditional tele-qual step. Intrinsic scoring does not equal qualified or ready to buy in my view, it it adds another behavioral dimension to your lead meta data that may cause you to prioritize or qualify differently.

Don't get me wrong as I'm not saying that there is no value to these systems. With a fundamental change in most buying processes today this information is highly valuable, but we still need to do a little old school tele qual before passing to sales.

The language and positioning also needs to be clear to sales in terms of what they getting.