How To Scout Players For The Pros? Score. Select. Offer. WIN.

If a professional sports team wants to become a dynasty, that organization will absolutely need to have a top notch scouting network. Sure, a team may be at the top of their game now, but time changes everything. Top players will leave or retire. Unforeseen injuries will impact the lineup. The team’s ownership needs a steady stream of talent coming through their pipeline to replace those losses and improve the team. 

Your business also needs a way to be continually looking towards the future by building out their client lists. You can think of the marketing department as the talent scouts for your company’s team. The Adobe Marketo Engage platform can help you build a scoring program that tracks your prospects from unknown all the way through the sales funnel. Once Marketo Engage knows about a prospect, their actions will be able to push them through each stage of the sales cycle, assessing their quality and if they are deserving of a roster spot.

Assessing The Pipeline

Your scoring program should be the result of a collaboration between your Marketing and Sales teams. The two groups need to be candid with each other. Transparency will only benefit the end product. This conversation should range from email campaigns to job titles to business size to webinars to physical trade shows and even more depending on the number of channels you utilize. How important is each facet of your approach to generating a sale?

The point is they will need to assign value to prospects’ demographics and actions. What are the most likely things that will lead to a sales opportunity? The two departments should devote significant resources to the project. If you have strong reporting already, you should be going through it in detail. Without formal data, you could start with some standard industry best practices and rely on anecdotal input from sales representatives.

Each demographic quality and action can be assigned values depending on how their relative importance is viewed. At what collective value of actions and demographics does the sales team think a prospect is ready to be sold to? Once determined, this threshold is when a prospect becomes a MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead). Just like a scouting network, Marketo Engage is sorting through all of your prospects and only bringing Sales those that are good for the team. 

Finding The Right Prospect

Your business will decide what actions are most predictive of sales opportunities that closed successfully. Leadous can help you translate those decisions into a working Marketo Engage program, meaning your instance will be customized for your organization. You can leverage our expertise and experience to build any scoring program no matter how complex. We can help you make sure everything is built according to best practices so you can be confident in the way your prospects are accumulating points on their journey towards becoming MQLs.

If you had to establish your scoring program without hard data, simply by getting one up and running, you will have drastically improved your reporting capabilities which is very beneficial in and of itself. Just as a sports team’s needs change over time leading to changing interest in specific players, the scoring program will need to be revisited as you periodically reassess the scores you assigned to your demographics and actions. Actions that were once highly predictive may become more loosely correlated with positive outcomes over time. Expansion could place greater emphasis on new regional demographics. You may even find that your MQL threshold needs to be adjusted.

You need to revisit your scoring program to make sure it stays reliable. You will never make it perfect. The most promising player can still unexpectedly blow out a knee. Your goal should be refining the program to be as close to perfect as possible. Incorporate patterns and lessons learned from incorrectly identified MQLs to update your program. 

You can also decide what to do with a record that MQL’d but still did not lead to a sales opportunity. Should they be recycled back into your marketing programs? If so, try to incorporate modifications to typical procedures in order to make them more likely to work out to a positive outcome on the next attempt. If not, sometimes a player just is not what the team needs, and the talent scouts need to move on.

Build Your Dynasty

A well developed scoring program will make both Marketing and Sales happier in the long run. It allows both departments to focus their energies in the most productive places. The Sales Team gets to gain confidence that the contacts they work with are more receptive to their efforts. The Marketing Team gains data that proves the effectiveness of their initiatives and how they lead to revenue. 

The Leadous team is happy to guide you through the construction and maintenance of a scoring program that becomes a reliable model for your business. We can help your marketing department become the talent scouts that make sure your team never has a down year and is always in the discussion for a championship season. Reach out to an expert today.