(Photo: http://www.heinz.com/)
The fastest wiener dog is not always the best wiener dog. The fastest lead to convert is not always the best lead. I’m sure by now, most of you have seen the Heinz ketchup commercial depicting a stampede of dachshunds wearing hot dog costumes. These pups race across an open field to a waiting group of humans dressed in condiment bottles where they leap into the condiment-costumed arms and presumably live happily ever after.
But what about the dozens of dachshunds that are not in the final frame being tenderly held by the oversized ketchup bottles? Where did they go? Did they race past the line of humans? Did they ever make it to their destination? The commercial cuts away before we can ever know the fate of the vast majority of the herd.
Ready to see the relevancy of dachshunds to B2B sales and marketing? The ketchup bottle-wearing humans represent the modern sales representative and the wiener dogs (more fun than dachshund, right?) represent prospects. You can apply the top marketing and sales lessons of the wiener dog stampede below to ensure that your sales representatives are focusing their time and energy on the leads who are most likely to close and benefit your business.
1. 3D Scoring – In a Customer Lifecycle Marketing solution like Right On Interactive’s, there are three different components that work together to comprehensively score every prospect and client along the customer journey. The three “D”s in 3D scoring are engagement score, profile score, and Customer Lifecycle Marketing (CLM) stage. Engagement measures how a lead or contact is interacting with your brand’s marketing emails, sales team, social media, online and offline events, and much more. Profile score measures how good of a “fit” a prospect or client is for your company. Think about the criteria for your target customer; this could include industry, company size, geographical location, technologies being used, or even the job title of the contact. CLM Stage uses gate criteria to determine the stage for each and every contact in your database. Gate criteria can be different stages in a company’s sales process such as leads, MQLs, and opportunities. If your sales team is only using one of the above categories to score prospects, it can result in priority being placed on the incorrect leads. The fastest wiener dogs received all of the love in the Heinz commercial, but the only criteria was raw speed!
2. Lead Nurturing – There are plenty of baby wiener dogs out there. They may need a little more time to develop as they run a little slower, but with the right “food” these pups can grow into mature, sales-qualified deals. The gate criteria in your CLM system easily identifies where a lead or contact is in the buyer’s journey which should determine what type of content and messaging that they receive. If a lead has entered a company’s ecosystem for the first time via a content download, they should be placed on a basic awareness campaign. On the other hand, if a sales representative creates an opportunity in their CRM after qualifying a lead, a campaign should be initiated that goes into deeper detail as far as competition differentiation and feature details. Through these different campaigns, your leads will continue to gain engagement points and further qualify themselves in the future weeks and months to allow sales representatives to focus on more immediate needs in the short term.
So there you have it folks, the Heinz ketchup bottles could have really missed the mark with their selected wiener dogs due to their use of only one type of lead scoring (speed). Next time you are evaluating your leads, ask yourself what data you are leaving out and how that data could affect your sales representatives and where they are spending their time.
