SSSSSSsssSSSSssss!!!

Hear that? That’s the sound of your nurturing program you just launched about to blow up. And you’re standing waaaayyy too close.

Before you know it that carefully crafted program will be in 100 pieces scattered across the landscape and the cows and chickens will be escaping!

It’s okay. There is probably still time to fix it.

Having worked on many nurturing programs across several automation platforms I can tell you there are three key pieces that often get forgotten or ignored.

3 Ways Your Lead Scoring Could Blow Up In Your Face

1. You didn’t talk to sales first
2. You’re 100% committed to the methodology you started with
3. You stopped paying attention

You didn’t talk to sales first

I worked with a very capable marketer who once said something horrifying. And I’ve found over the years this sentiment is common.

“They’re just sales, who cares what they think.”

This struck me as incredibly short-sighted and honestly quite vain. In my opinion, dialing up the Humble-meter and talking to sales is easy and can have a significant impact on your programs.

Being “right” is far less important than being good.

How to gather valuable feedback from sales:

1. Book 15 minute meetings with sales people and meet with them
2. Have some sales people who you can trust to give you honest feedback
3. Let them talk – they love to talk. Just listen.
4. Even though you’re probably busy you should make sure this occurs frequently.

You need to talk to them. And you need to listen.

The information I have gathered from sales has been instrumental in making every nurturing program I ever did a success.

You’re 100% committed to the methodology you started with

After hundreds of hours of strategizing, planning, creating and executing it can be difficult and painful to look at your program through a critical lens.

For some marketers even thinking that your program could be vastly better than what you launched with is a difficult thought.

Changing it up at this point might show your boss you weren’t right from the beginning and they not be happy with that.

Plus making changes is even more hard work.

I have learned a valuable and painful lesson over the years – the program you launched with isn’t perfect. In fact, usually it’s far from it.

Again, it’s time to dial up the humble and admit you’re not perfect and neither is your work.

How do improve the program you’ve just launched:

1. The day after I launch a program I begin with the mindset that it’s flawed. That some characteristic could be overhauled to make it better.
2. Over the next few weeks I use creative thinking to actively seek out the flaws, even if they are just theories.
3. Using analytics and common sense I turn those theories into a plan, and I make fixes.
4. You may need to repeat this process.

You stopped paying attention

This has happened to me before.

I launched a program and watched it for a few days. Everything looked good. So I stopped looking at it.

Then eventually somebody would come to me with a small issue but when I thought about the issue I realized it’s a symptom of something far bigger.

In a panic I opened up the hood to have a look.

Invariably everything had gone haywire or I had missed one critical piece that was now causing havoc.

Sometimes it’s irreversibly damage, like leads weren’t getting to sales properly.

Often it’s repairable, like a wait step said 2 days instead of 20 days. Or you were sending English emails to Spanish speaking contacts.

I monitor my programs that are freshly launched, and I go out of my way to do this PRIOR to launch.

How to monitor your programs:

1. Create lists or reports of every key step and compare those to what “should” be happening.
2. Review these frequently. Look for every place an error could occur including landing page completes, leads generated, leads assigned, scoring functionality, correct emails being sent etc.
3. Review individual contact records that are in your system – based on that record has everything occurred that should? Did they get the correct email at the correct time? Have all the field values populated correctly?

With a little bit of forethought, it’s easy to pick up the scattered blocks of your program and piece it back together into something better than what you originally crafted.

With some elbow grease and creative thinking, you’ll turn coal into diamond.