Lead Scoring Before and After Trade Shows

A NAB Show webinar series

In this webinar you’ll discover info about lead scoring you can use in your business now, no matter what types of events or marketing tactics you are using. Join Cindy Zuelsdorf from Kokoro Marketing and Kelly Mayeda, Segment Marketing Manager at Quantum.

 

 

Cindy:	Welcome to our NAB Show webinar for exhibitors, “Lead scoring before and after trade shows.” I’m Cindy, and we have Kelly today as our excellent guest. Yeah, tell us how your day’s going, Kelly.
Kelly:	Well, it’s a little bit early here on the west coast, but I’m in Seattle, Washington, no rain yet, we had crazy gusts of wind last night, so when I parked in the parking lot today, there was debris everywhere, which is very unusual for Seattle, we don’t get wind like that. A lot of people lost power, but I made it, we’re here, I’m really excited to be here, yeah, and kind of share some of my learnings and things we do here at Quantum.
Cindy:	Yay, we’re so happy you’re here with us. The purpose of our webinar is to give value to exhibitors and really share us as exhibitors, Kelly and me, share everything that we can with everybody, so that we can all have a better NAB show and just take our marketing to the next level. We’re going to get right into it, and Kelly, just tell us what you do sort of day to day at Quantum.
Kelly:	Yeah, sure. I’m the segment marketing manager here at Quantum, and I focus on two industries, the median entertainment industry, and then also video surveillance. My role as segment marketing manager is really, we are in charge as a group, as a team, for our content, our messaging, product launches related to the different segments, and then campaign oversight, so making sure whatever messaging and high level campaigns that we’re going after, we, from a segment perspective, have all of everything dialed in and ready for promotion, whether it’s top of funnel or bottom funnel. Then I also have a ton of responsibility with lead generation, which is what I would say, my passion, so lead scoring is definitely a big part of that. I’m excited to share more.
Cindy:	Nice, nice. Lead scoring has got kind of, you know a lot of people think of it in different ways, so how do you think of it at Quantum when you’re doing your day to day work, how do you define lead scoring?
Kelly:	Quantum’s been around for awhile, and so they’ve had a lot of different iterations of lead scoring. I will say one thing, is lead scoring is a process, it’s not something you just put into place and then you throw your hands up and you’re done. It’s something that takes a lot of iteration, takes a lot of communication between sales and marketing, and really is a learning process for any demand generation person or any marketing person. Really the goal is to generate more qualified and a solid volume, depending on your team, of leads. Every company is going to be different, you know I was at a small software company before Quantum, and so our lead scoring was extremely different, because we were 100% marketing driven leads, nothing was sales driven.
	Volume was a huge deal, whereas here at Quantum, you know we have a really strong legacy in the industry, we have a really strong customer base, and so a lot of our sales are driven from relationships that our salespeople have, or just our current customers. The lead gen, the marketing aspect of it is really about finding new opportunities.
Cindy:	Okay, so a lot of your lead scoring goals are really toward the new opportunity stuff?
Kelly:	Yes, yes, for sure.
Cindy:	Got you. Folks on the call, who is doing lead scoring right now? If you want to chat in, if you feel like you want to be private, it’s okay to chat to just the panelists or to share with the group, just kind of wondering who is doing any lead scoring right now. We’ll just keep an eye out for that as we go forward here. Kelly, tell us, when you do your lead scoring, kind of set that up, and is it changing all the time, is it the same, how do you score your people, like what do you base it on?
Kelly:	Like I said, lead scoring is really a process, and so especially for the folks who don’t have something already currently in place, or maybe you do, but you want to take a step back and really evaluate your existing process, you really need to think about your buyers. Not just who your buyers are, even though that’s really important, so personas are a really big part of that, so who are the users, who are the decision makers, you know what type of C-level is influential in the buying process, and then any other persona factors that could help push a sale long. Not just the buyers themselves, but also the buying process, and the journey that you want to take them on.
	From a marketing perspective, you know whether it’s certain content you want to share with them or certain experiences, maybe it’s an event or a webinar or something like that, trying to take all of that into consideration through lead scoring is a big part of the overall process. It’s easy to assign numbers to actions, but what’s really important is understanding your buyer’s journey, your buyer process, and who your buyers are, so that you can really guide them into the process that you want them to take, and essentially score them how you want them to interact with you.
Cindy:	Do you just sit down and go, “Okay, here’s my buyer’s journey, they meet me at a show, they talk to somebody, they ask for a demo,” or like how do you do that for Quantum?
Kelly:	I usually start with content, because oftentimes, I mean people say content is king, and it really is, you know whether you’re a software, hardware, services, having that thought leadership in the industry, whatever market you’re going after, is really important. From a top of funnel perspective, because it helps generate leads, whether it’s people filling out a form to read your e-book, or even from a PR-related perspective, getting thought leadership out there so that the market can understand what your positioning is. Content is usually what I start with, so what do we currently have, and where does it fall in the buyer’s journey?
	Serious decisions does a great job of explaining what the buyer’s journey is, but also how to kind of map it out for yourself. Awareness stage from a content perspective can be things like blogs or thought leadership pieces, social posts. Then as you move down the buyer’s journey, when they’re evaluating the decision, you would want to show them more things like customer stories or more technical data sheets. Mapping out how you want your prospects or customers to view your content and in what ways, whether it’s through webinars or emails or social or trade shows, that’s kind of the first stepping stone.
Cindy:	I work with a lot of small companies in the broadcast industry, and some of them are like, “I know I need to do marketing, but I don’t know what to do, and does it really help close sales?” There’s definitely a group of people who feel like, “The product’s really good, does it matter what I do in my marketing to close sales?”, and do you ever run across that, and how do you think the whole lead scoring before and after shows actually does affect sales, what do you think?
Kelly:	I mean, I 100% am a believer in that lead scoring and just the demand generation process in itself will help generate revenue, but also will help prioritize your sales team, which is the most important thing.
Cindy:	Yeah, that’s a good point, yeah, because they have a lot to follow up on.
Kelly:	Exactly.
Cindy:	How do you choose, like the person you know the best?
Kelly:	Exactly, and although sometimes having that anecdotal feeling as a salesperson or a relationship can definitely help influence how much attention you spend with a certain lead or not, but having something as arbitrary as lead scoring, where it’s very objective, like this is what the score is, whether you feel like it’s a good lead or not, kind of helps prioritize the team, and also I think allows our sales teams to feel more confident in that marketing is actually helping me do my job better, and giving me the leads that I need to help make my number or close business.
Cindy:	Yeah. Now, so do you find those salespeople actually like the lead scoring, do they find it beneficial, or are some of them like, “Ah, I don’t want to deal with that,” like what’s the general sense of that with the sales team?
Kelly:	I would say from my experience, most salespeople have no idea really what happens behind the curtain of the marketing world, they just know they get leads and they’re either good or they’re bad. Often you hear about the bad, which is normal, but when you do kind of see leads that marketing is generating or influencing even, you know close business or just the salesperson has a really great experience or goes on a really great customer meeting, that’s kind of the validation from the marketing team. I would say from a numbers perspective whether a click in an email or a visit a trade show, what numbers those mean to them, they don’t have any idea. I think it’s more about the value they see of prioritization of leads, that also can help, you know because it’s a characteristic of not only who they are, who the lead is, but also what they do.
	A hand raiser, someone who goes to your website and fills out a form or visits your trade show booth and has a meeting with you, in theory has a more propensity to buy because they’re more interested, or you’re doing something that they like.
Cindy:	Right, because they’re paying attention. I think you used a really great word, is influencing and stuff, because if they come to the show and have a demo, and then they don’t buy for 12 or 18 months, we’ve all been there, and so can influencing play a part in that, does that matter? I mean, I think that’s so interesting, really.
Kelly:	There is so much, and we’re going a little off-topic, Cindy, but I love talking about this, so I hope people are interested too.
Cindy:	Chat in, is this good, are we good, or if you have questions, you can ask them on the chat, we’re not using the QA today, we’re using the chat, so I would love to hear from you. Go ahead, Kelly.
Kelly:	Marketing attribution is a really big thing, and I’ll say that a lot of the way that things used to be in terms of marketing measurement in the past was very difficult. Like from a B2C perspective, putting an ad on a billboard, how do you know how much return you’re getting from that? Obviously the market has changed a lot, in that you can now put online banner ads up, and you get some of those metrics, not just impressions but clicks and views and things like that. It’s been really a game changer for I would say the marketing world, because you really have a view in how much influence you have and what campaigns are working, what aren’t, either from a direct to revenue perspective, they fill out a form, they take a meeting, we close the deal, or to your point earlier, they go to a trade show a year ago, you know we email nurture them for a year, they now have a project, they call us or from one of our reach outs, they respond, and then we close the deal.
	There’s a lot to be said for attribution and influence, although it’s still difficult to measure, I think the industry is getting, from a marketing perspective, way better at it, and it’s super exciting.
Cindy:	A few people have chatted in and said they aren’t lead scoring. For those of you who aren’t and maybe are interested in checking it out, maybe just wondering what the first step or two would be, would it be helpful to have a plan, maybe a plan that you could kind of go off from? I mean, is that something you guys would like to see? Let me say, I’m queuing that up because, all right, we got some yeses, a few yeses coming in here, Kelly, awesome, Kelly put together a plan, a pdf, and we’ll chat that in right now here to the box. You can download it right now, it’s a pdf and I just stashed it up on my web server just as a place right now. It’s going to be on that NAB blog, we’ll have a replay of this webinar up along with show notes and the pdf that you can download, so we’re sharing this with everybody.
	You guys get early access to it because you’re live on the webinar, so feel free to dig into that. Kelly, do you want to speak to that plan you put together a little bit? Specifically for people who aren’t lead scoring, what are the sort of top one or two things that somebody might want to take a step in maybe before the NAB show or before CABSAT or before whatever show that they’re going to next, BBE, whatever it may be, what might they do first?
Kelly:	Cindy asked me to put together a rubric of lead scoring, and I started thinking about, “Okay, if I needed to put together a brand new lead scoring plan, what would I do first?” As I mentioned before, it’s easy to assign numbers to actions, that’s like the easiest part of the whole process, honestly, but then I started thinking about, “Well, I need to really understand who my buyers are, and again, what journey I want to take them through.” You’ll see I the pdf, I kind of outline different steps that I would take if I was setting up lead scoring for the first time again, having learned this the hard way.
	I would say that once you feel like you have a good understanding of the journey and the process you want your buyers to take, you know assigning those lead scores honestly is kind of up to you. That’s why I would say the most important thing is testing, measuring, and then changing if needed, because every product, every buying process, every buyer is going to be different based on your company. You know it best, and if you don’t know it, you test, and if it didn’t work, you try it again. Also, even if it is working for a little while, you know and volume may be low or quality may be bad, that’s when you change again.
	We’re a 30 plus year old company, and we reiterate on lead scorings too, and also every segment is different, so how we lead score in video surveillance versus MNE is very different as well, because those buyers are different, the buying process is different. I would say the most important thing I think is your relationship and the process that you develop with your sales team, because that’s going to be, you know you want to drive sales, you want to help up level the most quality of your leads, but also give them enough volume so that they are having enough conversations, closing enough deals.
	Having that open communication with your sales leadership of, “Okay, how are the leads doing this week, even, this month, this quarter, what can we improve upon together?” It’s not just a marketing thing, it’s also a sales thing, and so having that relationship is super important. I would say relationship with the sales and measurement.
Cindy:	All right, so folks in the audience, are you able to download that pdf? Fallon put the link up there, has anybody been able to click on it, is that link working? Okay, good good, all right, yay. I can say that one of the folks I was just working with on something last week, just to boil it down really simply is like, we did a thing where we were, like you were talking about content, so we started out with like, “What do people need to learn about before they buy our stuff? Okay, they need to learn about this particular topic, this technical topic,” so we did a whitepaper on that topic. Then if someone’s interested in that topic, it makes sense that they might be interested in the product that would solve solutions around that.
	The next thing was maybe a video on how to solve this problem, and by the way, there’s this product that’ll do it. Then eventually, you know maybe the third or fourth step down is, “Hey, would you like to download a software trial, if that’s applicable?” The steps are really, you can start really simple, you can start with just like three steps and try it like, “Okay, I’m going to do a whitepaper, and then a video,” or maybe it’s too hard to do a video, just data sheet, you already have that, it’s okay, like don’t have to reinvent the wheel, and then drive to whatever that thing is they do right before they buy, whether it’s, you know everybody’s like, “I want anybody with money, and I want them to buy.”
	Well, of course we do, but what do they do right before that? Maybe download that trial, or get a quote, whatever the thing is. Then to me, if someone downloads a trial or requests a consult with a salesperson, like that’s a lot of points. If my scale is, I don’t know, one to 50, like I might give someone 50 points for filling in a form for saying they want to meet with a salesperson, just for example. Kelly’s pdf spells that out, but I thought I’d just lay it out in super simple terms right here, maybe one click in an email is one point, maybe. Like you said, it could be five points, and then you can adjust the scoring or rubric if you want to.
Kelly:	Yeah, and it can also be based on just who they are.
Cindy:	Yeah, talk about that. You and I talked about that the other day, that’s awesome.
Kelly:	Especially from like an ABM, an account based marketing approach, or say you’ve sold into this one really large company and you know that there’s other opportunities within that large company that would be a great fit for your product, you could say, “If they’re from this company, they automatically MQL, or their lead score is 100,” or whatever the max is, so that it would push them over.
Cindy:	MQL, and just for the couple of people who might not know that one on the call, marketing qualified lead, versus SQL, sales qualified lead, other people use other acronyms. Anyway, not to be too basic, but I just wanted to throw that in. Go for it.
Kelly:	You could look at it in terms of the company that they’re associated with, but also the job title or function, or maybe even an industry, like you know you do really well in healthcare, and so somebody who comes from a healthcare industry may score higher than somebody who comes from insurance. Again, that’s why it’s so important to know your buyers, or at least have an idea of who your top buyers are or who you’ve had success with, so then you can start with that nugget and develop lead scoring around that, and then maybe you learn something that like, “Man, construction companies really love my product, and I didn’t know that before, but I’ve developed this lead scoring that was heavy towards healthcare, but after going through iteration and looking at how many leads that have been a part of construction, that have scored well and had good appointments or sales meetings, I’m going to now score them higher.”
	Engagement is really important, because what we say is they’re hand raisers, they’re saying, “Okay, I’m interested, tell me more,” even if it’s indirect. Maybe it’s just visiting a web page or attending a webinar, but I think also looking at who they are is really important, because you know again, going back to the personas, if a C-level is attending a trade show and having a meeting with you, that’s a pretty big deal. Even if he’s not the buyer, he’s an influencer and he can say to the buyer, “Hey, you should really check out Company XYZ, I visited them at NAB and they were doing some great things.”
Cindy:	I love that. Now when you’re talking about the scoring, is all that automatic, or do you have to put some hand work into it, do stuff manually, what does that look like? I mean, can a small company do this? We know bigger companies can, but yeah, talk about that, if you don’t mind.
Kelly:	Tools are really important, and automation is obviously very helpful. I would say, depending on your volume and the size of the company, it’s totally something you could do manually. I’ve actually never done it manually, I’ve had the luxury of having things like Marketo or Hub Spot into place that will help you lead score, but you still have to be the one to kind of set those scores up however you decide to do it, on Marketo it’s out of 100. You just kind of play with it, and I would say go with your gut initially after you’ve done your upfront work, and I also put in the document like the ways that we look at lead scoring on a few examples, but automation is really nice for sure. Marketo is great, but I know for smaller companies, it’s not necessary, and so even manually I think is totally possible.
Cindy:	Yeah, definitely Hub Spot is great. Our guest coming up in December I believe uses Hub Spot for their company, and then for smaller companies, I can definitely speak to that, because that’s one of my specialties, and Infusion Soft is the one that I use for that, and that can be based on flames, which is kind of nice, so five flames is a hot lead, and one is maybe less. Like you said, there’s tons of tools out there, it’s not really about the tool. I do a little bit of manual scoring, because if someone comes to the NAB show, I might give them, I don’t know, 25 points if they sat down and had a demo, but only five points if they were one of those walk by people that throws your card and splits, right? That is a little bit of a manual scoring, because you’re looking at the different people, and so it is possible for any sized company to take into account what people are doing, and really have an advantage from looking at that scoring.
Kelly:	Yeah, and I think trade shows, like you mentioned, offers a very unique lead scoring measurement manually, because it is important as a marketing person at the show to be able to gauge how elite interacts with us. Like you said, maybe at a certain show, you just get the entire attendee list, well you’re not going to score them the same.
Cindy:	Right.
Kelly:	If they come and talk to you, you’re going to score them way different than if you just were lucky enough to get their email address. I think also at trade shows, you know having the ability, even if it’s just writing notes on a business card, “Really solid conversation, or not interested right now, but a really good lead,” things like that that you can take back with you and do some of that manual scoring is I think important, and will be valuable in the future, even though it is some heavy lifting upfront.
Cindy:	Nice, nice. Hey, so we have been just having a blast talking here and we’re well past our 20-ish minutes at this point. Everybody on the call, we chose 20 minutes because I figure you guys are super busy, and so we’re trying to pack a ton of value into a short bit of time and make it worthwhile for everybody. A couple things around that, I just want to tell you what’s upcoming, and then we will also take time right now, Kelly and I will stay on for Q and A as long as people have any questions and want to dig into stuff. We’ll also give you some contact info too, if you want to contact us afterward, that’s another way to do stuff as well.
	Upcoming, if you guys want to register for all of the webinar series, we have another eight after this, now through NAB show, and actually one right after the show, you can do that. Fallon, if you don’t mind chatting the reg link in there, we’re going to update that registration page actually later today, so we’ll keep that updated and stuff. In December, we have demand generation, so I was wondering if that’s a topic that’s interesting as well, it really ties into lead scoring, so let me know what you think about that. Louis Tedesco ChyronHegowill be on talking about that. Then later in December, we also are going to take a look at LinkedIn and how to do, Kelly, you mentioned account based marketing or ABM, and just how to use LinkedIn to stay in touch with your customers and your prospects, and maybe do a little account based marketing, we’ll take a look at that.
	Then, these webinars are for you guys, and so we want to hear what stuff you guys want to talk about. The rest of the schedule is purposely to be announced right now, because I want to hear from you. I can think of a million awesome topics, I’m sure you can too, Kelly, but this is for you, so do come back to us with that. Fallon, if you wouldn’t mind just popping my email address in the chat as well, and I see we have some questions coming in, so let’s dig into a couple of those right now. Okay, love this question, “Is it better to grab everybody that walks by the booth, or only capture leads of people that are really interested?” Kelly, you want to dig into that one a little bit?
Kelly:	Yeah, I mean I will say, this is one of those like age-old debates, even internally we fight over this. I personally have the philosophy, and this is again, based on where we stand as a company, because we’re a little bit more mature, I don’t think we need to get every single lead that walks by, and because we’re a little bit more known on the industry, so on the MNE side, it’s definitely to our benefit, that I don’t feel like it’s 100% necessary to grab everybody and be like, “Give me your contact information.” I will say, if you’re a newer company and you are trying to get the value out of trade shows in terms of building up your database and having a strong group of people that you know are within your industry to market to, whether they’re going to buy something now or later, then that strategy does make sense, I will say.
	I think it depends on where your company is, and what the purpose of going to shows actually means for you, whether it’s to set up pre-scheduled meetings and just have those meetings there, because everyone’s going to be at that show, or if it’s purely trying to generate volume of leads, I think is how I would think of it.
Cindy:	Right, I mean if you’re looking to build your list, you do want qualified people, but if you’re almost resorting to buying a list, like if someone’s doing that, then like grabbing everybody in the aisle … I can see some of the different people on the call, and I’m familiar with some of the companies, there’s companies here that will only really take note of somebody who’s come in and made some time commitment and interacted on a demo, and there’s companies on this call right now who hire an agency with smart models to hang out in the aisles and collect people that way.
	I think they’re both brilliant, like you said, it’s what’s your goal, and what are you going to do next? Because if you just collect them and they’re in your database, your CRM forever, kind of who cares? It’s really what’s the next step in promoting the business and the company.
Kelly:	Yeah, and email nurture is a huge part of that, which I could suggest could be another topic for you, Cindy.
Cindy:	Let me write that down. Email nurture, I’m writing that down. You talked about personas, personas and avatars is like a huge topic for me, I’m just all about it and stuff, so if people are interested in personas and avatars and what that means to your marketing and why it matters, let us know. You should be able to leave your comments also on the NAB blog, I believe the comments will be open there, and so that’s a place where you can also say, “Hey, I love this, and I’d also like to hear more about email nurture,” or something like that, so yeah.
Kelly:	I will also say, to that question, whatever strategy you decide, make sure your lead scoring is matched up with that strategy.
Cindy:	What do you mean by that? Tell me more.
Kelly:	If your strategy is to grab anybody and everybody that walks by your booth, make sure that you score them lower than what you would score someone who you had a solid conversation with and is actually more interested. I would say it’s probably easiest to just decide on a strategy and make sure you either scan the leads that you have had actual conversations with people, and not worry about kind of the fly-bys and scanning everybody, or if you scan everybody, then make that known within your lead scoring that that’s the type of lead you’re getting, versus a real conversation.
Cindy:	That’s where I would actually use some manual scoring, it’s like I’m going to score everybody at, I don’t know, one, and then I’m going to go back in and pick the hot leads, you know whether I look at the salesperson’s comments, or whether I have the infrared scanner and I can see that that person sat at the demo booth three times in a row. Whatever the data is that helps me to go in and actually manually score it, I think it’s a great way to do it and track stuff that way. Let me just look at this, because I bet you there’s some people on this call, maybe, maybe not, who might say, “I can remember all the hot leads, I know who sat down and had a hot demo, and I don’t really care about the rest of the people who walk by. Why should I lead score? I already have an understanding of who’s hot.”
Kelly:	I would say because, well one, I commend your memory, because I have to write everything down because I don’t remember anything, but also, you never know what they’re going to do afterwards. You may think that this is not a hot lead, you know they just came by and took my tchotchke four times, they don’t care about my company or my solution, but then you may discover they visited my webpage four times over the last week, and they were on the pricing page and they downloaded an e-book. That preconceived notion of that specific lead has completely changed, because they’re showing you in the way that they’re interacting with you that they are interested. That’s the great thing about lead scoring, is it’s very objective. It should be very objective.
Cindy:	It should be, right? Let’s see, we have another comment here, “Would love email nurture webinar,” awesome, that’s one of my favorite topics, so I’m all in on that. “Any chance will be at NAB and do a session in person?”, yeah, totally. A couple things about that, I like to share whatever I can with people, and so on my website, Fallon, I’ll let you chat that in, kokoroinc.com, I have a “contact me” in the corner, and I will do a 20-minute session with anybody, just like a 20-minute strategy session, glad to do that. Then yeah, we could meet up at NAB, and I’ll talk with NAB show people, maybe they may want to do an on-site, or we’ll just see what’s happening with that. Again, we want to be of service, so yes, yes, I like that. What other questions do we have? Anybody, before we sign off? Kelly, are you comfortable with people reaching out, LinkedIn, Twitter, what’s easy for you, what would you like with contact?
Kelly:	Yeah, I would say LinkedIn is probably the best way to reach out to me, and if you have questions, like even a very specific question, I’m happy to help.
Cindy:	That is super nice of you.
Kelly:	Yeah, of course.
Cindy:	All right, we’re going to call it a wrap. Thank you everybody, totally appreciate everybody’s comments, and look forward to seeing you on the next session on December 5th. Have a beautiful day, thank you, Kelly.
Kelly:	Thank you, bye everyone.

 

 

 

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