Wilson, the marketing manager for Europe, is in a Catch-22 situation. He generates marketing qualified leads that are then sent to the inside sales team for follow-up.

Inside sales wants both, high lead quality and high lead volume. Wilson uses the BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) criteria to ensure lead qualification. If any of the above elements is missing, he doesn’t send the leads over to inside sales. Most of his BANT-qualified leads come from the website. He has a web form in place that ask the customers to provide answers to BANT questions. The conversion rate on this form is only 30%, which means 70% of prospects who reach this form, drop out. Recently, inside sales was complaining that the lead volume was too low. Wilson loosened the BANT criteria to try and increase the lead volume by allowing leads with 3 out of the 4 BANT qualifications. However, this led to a decrease in lead quality and he had to go back to the full BANT qualification.

Wilson is now working with his marketing automation counterpart, Danielle, to figure out a way to identify which leads are ready to be sent to inside sales without the intrusive BANT qualification form. A fun challenge! They involve his marketing analyst, Mavis, to look at marketing automation data and analyze whether there are any lead characteristics that can be used instead of BANT qualification.

Goal

Identifying when a marketing prospect is ready to be handed off to sales for a deeper conversation about a product/service purchase Currently, for lead qualification, many marketing organizations have a BANT criteria. If a prospect meets these criteria, they get transferred to the sales team (usually, the Inside Account Manager sales team). If not, the prospect gets recycled into the marketing database. This BANT qualification system might not fit present-day customer journeys, where customers want to do most of the research on their own and talk to sales only when they absolutely want to. Asking them if they are BANT ready qualifies for a bad customer experience, especially when a form (to determine BANT) is inserted into the journey of customers as they try to find more information on the products they are evaluating. It just interrupts their journey—no one likes forms or filling out detailed information.

Example of a web form for BANT qualification

Wilson's Pain Points

• Customers hate forms and disclosing more information than what they need to. This makes it difficult to determine whether prospects are ready to be handed off to sales.
• Explicitly qualifying for all four BANT criteria leads to very few prospects being handed off to sales, leading to a lower number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs).
• Lower net promoter score (NPS) as a result of a bad customer experience driven by forcing the customer to take steps that they don’t want to.

Fun Fact

I have experienced a 50% to 70% customer drop-off rate on a landing page with a form. Imagine losing more than 50% of your customers because of a form. Wouldn’t it be great if there was another way to identify when customers are ready to talk to sales?

Idea

Could looking at prospects’ digital touchpoints (web visits, content downloads, social touchpoints, ad clicks, etc.) help qualify prospects as leads to be called by sales?

Decision to be Made

Could the count of digital touchpoints and the timeframe of the digital touchpoints help qualify leads to be called by sales?

Key Stakeholders

• Marketing Managers: Meeting monthly lead targets with lead quality SLAs, allocating marketing investments, and carrying ROI targets
• Inside Account Managers: Meeting order targets with no time to waste on bad leads
• Marketing Analysts: Responsible for data analysis

Hypothesis

Prospects who have a high number of digital touchpoints in a short timeframe are qualified enough to be handed off to sales while maintaining lead quality and conversion.

Learn more about how to prove or disprove this hypothesis in our course Using Data Analytics for Decision-Making in B2B Marketing