Marketers: Five Steps for Better Alignment with Sales

by Laura Cross, Eloqua

A “lead scoring” best practice tells us to ensure alignment between marketing and sales . After all, the sales team is the beneficiary of what marketing implements for lead scoring. If you have the sales team’s buy-in, it will make your life as a marketer much easier.

So how can you make sure there is buy-in from sales at the beginning of the process? One of our customers, Astute Solutions equipped their sales team with a “lead attribute” worksheet, which allowed sales to rank each value assigned to a lead. Not only did this worksheet improve the overall quality of the lead scoring program, but it also involved sales early in the process. Astute’s marketing team collaborated with a few key sales people, explained the process and invited them complete the worksheet. Later, Astute aggregated the data and provided marketing with a collaboratively assigned definition of a qualified lead.

• Step 1 – Defined Explicit and Implicit Criteria, for example – Job Function, Webcast Attendee.
• Step 2 – Define Values for each Explicit Criteria, for example – values A – G.
• Step 3 – Choose sales reps to complete the worksheet. Provide them with the Criteria and Values and ask them to weight each 1-3. 1= Low Value, 2= Moderate Value 3= High Value.
• Step 4 – Aggregate all the sales reps’ answers into one worksheet . Total the entire score. The weighted average is the total score divided by how many sales reps involved in the process. For example Value A for Job Function was 15 Total Score, divided by 5 sales reps = Weighted Average 3.0.
• Step 5 – Based on the Weighted Average, each is High Value, Moderate Value or Low Value. Now you can use this information to ensure your lead scoring categories and attributes are 100% in alignment with sales’ approach to a qualified lead.