Like many of you, I’m a huge football fan. Once the season starts, I pretty much schedule my weekend around the games. Needless to say, I spend a lot of time talking, reading, and thinking about football. When I got to work this morning and started prioritizing my leads, it struck me how similar using lead scoring to prioritize my leads is to using players’ stats to pick up free agents in my Fantasy Football League.
For those of you who dabble in the world of fantasy football, you’re probably familiar with the concept of browsing the free agent market and keeping an eye out for key pickups throughout the season. Any good fantasy football owner will tell you that you need to keep the team full of talent. By continually working the free agent market, fantasy owners will be able to navigate bye weeks and work around injuries.
When you go looking for good talent, you identify the key criteria and then sort accordingly. Below is the interface at which Fantasy owners will scour for player talent.
Fantasy owners will be able sort based on various fields (rushing yards, tds, total fantasy points, etc.) or columns, bringing the cream to the top. Good fantasy owners know how to use this scoring to their advantage.
With a good marketing automation platform, your sales reps should be able to take advantage of this cherry picking methodology. Your lead scoring model should enable your sales reps to take advantage of up to date points based on data that’s being tracked. Moreover, they should be able to sort by the different criteria (fit for a particular product or offering, recent interest, total lead score, etc.)
Note the Sales rep’s interface for browsing for leads/contacts to pursue (CRM System):
In the screen above, a Sales Rep can go and work the “best” leads first by identifying those that are both a great fit AND who have shown activities recently. The fit, interest, and total scores equate to different yet important categories like rushing yards, touchdowns, etc.
Rather than having to go and look at each record individually, your Sales Rep can quickly see if someone, in spite of showing a lot of interest, is a good or a bad fit, and know whether that lead is worth the time. This will help make your sales team more productive by making them more efficient and by saving them time.
Whether you’re a sales rep or a fantasy football owner, you know that choosing the best players is what makes you successful. Lead Scoring, like players’ stats is put in place to help you determine who is going to make you the most successful. In both fantasy football and sales, choosing the right players is an important part of your win/loss record.
Maybe this calls for a global lead trading system. I'll give you two 70 point leads in the healthcare industry for 1 90 point lead in the IT field. There could be something to this.
Posted by: Mike Rogers | September 17, 2009 at 07:30 AM