Recently, my friend and colleague Will Waugh published Lead Management Automation – How We Did It and What we Learned, the first in this series of Lead Management Automation posts. While Will focused on outlining the digital marketing challenges we faced at SAS, I focused on solving those challenges. Here was our approach:

1. Define Project Objectives:

• Improve the online experience for prospects searching for SAS Software
• Implement a lead scoring system that makes a distinction between visitors who are “just browsing” (leads to nurture) from those who are “sales-ready” (leads ready to buy)
• Implement Marketing Automation software that automatically triggers and tracks email communications
• Align Web Content to changing customer behaviors
• Impact Revenue by increase lead-to-sales-opportunity conversion rates

2. Build Business Requirements: We developed our requirements around disparate data and built a centralized data mart that holds key information about customer and prospect behavior.

3. Idenitify Data Elements: To start, we identified data from 3 distinct data sources (Web Database, Sales Database, and Marketing Interaction Database) . In all, over 100 data elements were needed from these data sources to address our business requirements.

4. Develop a Lead Scoring Methodology: We developed a scoring model that assigns points to web visitors based on 2 factors:

• Who the visitors are (explicit scores): Assign points to Job Title, Job Function, Company Industry, and Company Size.
• What the visitors do (implicit scores): Assign points to individual downloads (white papers, demos, Webinars, case studies, research reports, event registrations, and so on).

5. Implement Marketing Automation: We implemented a Marketing Automation platform to automate nurturing campaign logic and email communications to the next best offer.

I will be speaking on this very topic at SAS Global Forum 2011. I'm sharing the paper I will be presenting below. (You're getting it first!) If you will be there this year, please attend the presentation. It is Wednesday, April 6th at 11am and is entitled “Lead Nurturing Using SAS Customer Intelligence Solutions.” I would love to carry on the conversation in a live setting.

Lead Nurturing using SAS