Look Ma, No Hands!

Call it hands-free lead management. DeuxO, a new breed of CRM technology which launched March 14, can take every lead coming into a company, assign it a score based on that lead’s readiness and likelihood to buy, then shuttle that lead to sales if it’s hot or marketing if it’s not, where it can be targeted with a series of campaigns, depending on its score. If leads tend to fall into your competitors’ hands through the gap between your marketing and sales departments, DeuxO – a name derived from the two O’s in opportunity optimization – may be worth a look.

Here’s how it works on a 100-point scale: when an inquiry comes into a company, the system evaluates various aspects of that lead (defined in a profile established by each customer) and assigns it a score. Any lead above 90, for instance, would immediately be sent to sales. In descending increments of 10, other groups would be assigned a letter grade – B, C, D, or U for unknown – and siphoned into the marketing department. Marketing campaigns then can be targeted to each group based on their level of interest.

For the U track, they’ll be inexpensive campaigns, possibly via email, designed to gather more information on the contact. “As the person moves into the C track, campaigns might be centered on identification of need. When they become a B, now you hit them with ROI campaigns,” says Bob Merlo, DeuxO’s chief marketing officer. The contacts who stay the course ultimately get routed to sales as hot, or A, leads. The system will even route them to the correct salesperson – by geographical area, vertical market expertise, that salesperson’s backlog, etc. “You build rules into the system to send the lead to the person most likely to close the sale,” says Merlo.

After four or five months of using the system, companies should be able to see which marketing campaigns are most effective with which types of people, look at closing trends in sales and, if necessary, adjust the profiles of how leads are assigned. It also can create revenue forecasts by using past trends to conduct predictive analysis on when the B, C and D opportunities will move into the sales department and close.