If you’re reading this, chances are you’re a B2B marketer working in demand generation or marketing operations. The odds further suggest that you or someone you work with has spent grueling time pouring over spreadsheets to get leads ready for your marketing automation and/or CRM system.
It’s a taxing, time-consuming process that eats away at resources (not to mention team morale…no one goes to college to scrub and format leads). But it’s necessary.
And in the throes of such tedium, it’s easy to overlook an erroneous email here and an untargeted job title there, allowing bad data to get into the all-important customer database. This “dirty data” skews performance measurement and hinders your ability to optimize programs effectively.
Individually, these mishaps aren’t cause for major concern, but they quickly add up to challenges that can undermine marketing’s value to the business. As Ben Staley, Marketing Programs Manager at Rackspace, succinctly said:
“The number of channels used to drive demand is so vast – it’s not hard to get leads, it’s hard to get the ones you need and convert them. We had a dirty database with a lot of incorrect email addresses – this meant low engagement for nurturing campaigns.” (Get the Rackspace case study here)
We created the Lead Integrity Checklist to help demand marketers minimize the effects of poor lead data getting into your customer database.
[Click the image below to get the ungated checklist tool in Excel]
How the Lead Integrity Checklist can help
The Checklist’s main values help with four things:
- Aid in filtering out as many of the bad leads as possible so that they don’t hinder the quality of your database
- Provide you with a clearer picture of which lead sources/vendors are providing higher quality leads so that you can adjust budget accordingly
- Allow you to track the time required to process leads, which will then help you make more informed calculations on campaign ROI and decisions about which channels/sources to use
- Give you and your team a tool with which to show execs the time and resources being spent on certain efforts and why demand marketing tech may be a wise investment
Using the Lead Integrity Checklist
The checklist may be used holistically every time you process leads for a specific campaign or program (i.e., across several lead vendors) or for individual lead vendors. The checklist is meant to be customizable to your specific processes.
The checklist spreadsheet is separated into three sections:
Section A: Lead File(s) Tracking
The top section of the spreadsheet is used to track all the leads that were processed in a certain interval. For example, if you’re tracking leads by a certain campaign – let’s say an event you’re attending – you can insert the event name, date, total number of leads, etc.
Moreover, after you’ve processed the leads, there are two fields used to keep track of how many are “quality” leads (this can mean both “qualified” for targeting or “acceptable,” if purchased from a third-party lead vendor) and how many were rejected.
Section B: Lead Processing Checklist
This section comprises the actual checklist of tasks needed to ensure the highest level of lead integrity. There are ten steps in total:
Further, the Checklist Excel file provides a column to the right of the steps used to track the amount of time needed to perform each task. This may seem unnecessary, but if you find your team is spending more than 10 hours a week on manual lead processing tasks, it may be an indication that you should adjust or automate these processes.
Section C: Processing Time and Velocity Totals
This last section is used to aggregate the time totals and to track top-funnel lead velocity, that is, the time elapsed between receiving first lead and uploading last processed lead file to your customer database/nurture tracks.
Like the inefficient use of staff time and resources for manual lead processing, slow lead velocity is also cause for concern. If you find it’s taking a week to get leads into your database (MA or CRM system), that means your allowing lead interest to cool, which will negatively affect conversion rates and pipeline growth. It’s something to keep an eye on and fix if uploading leads to the database is taking more than a couple days.
Demand Orchestration Software can help with all these manual tasks, but we’ll get to that in a later post. For now, get the checklist here.
