Although lead scoring contributes to a successful lead nurturing program, a report [download page] from Openprise indicates that B2B marketers do not have much confidence in their lead scoring abilities. Indeed, only slightly more than one-third (35%) say they have full confidence in their ability to accurately score leads.
The more than 250 B2B marketing executives and professionals surveyed cite several areas where they are struggling with lead scoring. The most common problems cited are getting widespread adoption by the sales team (31%), incorporating firmographic data (30%), and incorporating internal signals about buying behavior, such as prospect’s behavior on their website and email activity (28%).
Data Onboarding and Cleansing Challenges
The ability to score leads more confidently may also be hindered by issues involving data. In fact, most of the issues that weigh heavily on respondents’ minds involve data. With a majority of B2B marketers saying that data quality is important to a company’s effectiveness, respondents to this recent survey say that increasing pressure to maintain high data quality without better tools or prowess (45%) along with organizational dysfunction caused by departmental and data silos (37%) are issues that keep them up at night. Added to that, only about one-third (34%) claim to be very confident in their ability to execute the data onboarding process, citing challenges to the process such as lack of internal expertise, no interest in this type of project and lack of consensus as to the best approach.
Furthermore, more than half (54%) of respondents say they are not confident or are only somewhat confident in their data cleansing processes. This is not helped by a lack of interest in addressing data cleansing challenges (43%) and a lack of team bandwidth to take on a data cleansing project (43%).
An inefficient data cleansing process can hinder the routing of leads to the appropriate salesperson. Two of the biggest challenges respondents see in lead routing include missing key fields such as state, phone number and industry and too many duplicate leads, contacts and accounts with different owners.
Account Scoring and ABM
Much like with lead scoring, when it comes to account-based marketing (ABM) B2B marketers cite difficulties in incorporating internal signals about buying behavior and integrating firmographic data. They also consider melding technographic insights and creating models that reflect the ideal customer profiles as common challenges for account scoring.
These challenges can lead to problems in executing an effective ABM strategy, with other research showing that a majority of B2B marketers are building their ABM targeted account lists using firmographics and behavioral signals. However, respondents to this survey report a variety of other challenges executing an ABM strategy – such as lack of internal expertise, lack of interest in ABM, as well as a lack of consensus on the best approach.
Finally, when it comes to campaign attribution, the most cited challenges include: opportunities often not having contacts associated with them; finding models that represent the sales cycle; and the sales team often not including all relevant contacts in an opportunity.
Find the full report here.
About the Data: Findings are based on a June and July 2021 survey of 273 B2B marketing executives and professionals from companies with at least 250 employees.
