eCommerce Analytics

Most of the talk today in B2B marketing is about gathering leads. With Google AdWords going crazy on us and SEO the hot new term, it seems that everybody is intent on generating a boatload of new prospects. Nothing wrong with that. But it does create a problem of scale. Does your organization have the salesforce to handle the explosion of leads? Probably not. Why is that a problem? Because without a lead scoring system, you’re trading quantity for quality by putting some of your best prospects on the backburner. With the glut of new leads out there, it’s easy to see that lead effectiveness is more important than ever.

Sure, most companies have some form of lead scoring in place. But the two most common methods, telemarketing pre-qualification and manual qualification, are expensive in the first case and inaccurate in the second. Manual qualification has the added problem of exposing the divide between sales and marketing. (They often have diverging views on what a good prospect really is.) And scoring is also only as good as the rules that are created. If the scoring system isn’t constantly revamped based on the actual sales wins, then what good is it?

Data mining techniques are different than common scoring techniques because they constitute an impartial observer. Data mining keeps departmental biases and political loyalties out of the equation. More importantly, data mining techniques effectively lop off the worst leads - the leads that clog the sales funnel - simply by projecting a prospect’s likely behavior based on your past prospects’ behaviors. Best of all, data mining techniques can account for hidden attributes that a human can’t. Did you notice that your best prospects visit your web pages in a specific pattern? Well, a well-trained predictive model does. And it’ll mark the clickthrough pattern as more important in determining the prospect conversion probability than how many white papers they’ve downloaded.

Now that leads are on the rise, B2B marketers should focus on increasing the sales win rate by intelligently funnelling the best leads. And this means dropping some of the prospects that likely won’t produce. To weed out my worst leads, I’m betting on data mining over rule-based scoring systems any day of the week.