Selecting a Provider to Score Your Leads Here is a comparison of four marketing tools aimed at helping you score leads.
By Mikal E. Belicove •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
If landing leads is an art, knowing which prospects are more likely to turn into customers is a science. Here are a few vendors who've managed to develp tools that help you crack the code.
Each provider below offers marketing automation or revenue-performance management services -- a.k.a. customer relationship management tools -- that includes a lead management and lead scoring tool based on your website's activity. So not only will these tools measurably contribute to the bottom line, they'll also accurately help you score more leads in less time -- giving you added opportunities to convert leads into paying customers.
Optify: With Optify's marketing-automation tools, sales teams can qualify and score Web leads, focus sales efforts with real-time lead scoring and alerts, align marketing and sales, and potentially close more deals by assigning the right leads to the right sales person at the right time. It offers the ability to have multiple lead scores, which can be customized to individual needs -- allowing you to prioritize your leads in Salesforce based on these lead scores and visit data. It also incorporates both activity data and objective lead criteria into the lead score -- again, making it very simple for sales people and marketers to know which leads to focus on. Optify offers a free edition and four paid editions ranging in price from $500 a month to $2,500 a month.
Genius: Genius enables the identification and delivery of qualified leads while the sales prospect is still on your website. Best yet, you don't even have to tag your website in order to track a visitor's behavior. For large companies, that means IT doesn't have to get involved for implementation, and for smaller businesses, implementation and tagging can be outsourced -- no need for in-house help. With Genius in place, you're tracking a visitors behavior even before you know who they are, so when they do make themselves known by filling out a form or responding to an email, you've already got their history in the lead scoring tool. Genius' product is free, but for the upgraded package with leads scoring and nurturing, the fee starts at $9,600 a year.
Marketo: This company utilizes Revenue Performance Management, or RPM, which brings marketing and sales functions together to work in concert toward a common revenue goal. Marketo's solutions include lead scoring and lead management. It provides free trials of its system, along with a customer expert, a free on-boarding process, and Salesforce integration -- all included in the subscription price, which begins at $2,000 a month.
Eloqua: Also available at $2,000 a month is Eloqua, whose RPM platform -- called Eloqua 10 and released at the end of last year -- pairs a business application with a powerful revenue analytics and reporting engine. The process includes campaign execution, testing, measuring, profiling of prospects and lead nurturing. Eloqua 10 provides implicit and explicit profile information that can be triggered when a prospect returns to your website -- even if they don't fill out a form. The platform offers personalized direct mail, voicemail and SMS messaging to target scored leads.
Do you use lead scoring software? Leave a comment and tell us how they've worked for you.
