Discussion of academic lead management with the A-team:
First comments by Chuck, updated by Pany and Paolo:
- Which leads are most important?
- Web requests and conference leads. Web requests for obvious reasons.
- Then any lead where a customer attended an event and saw JMP, either a workshop, conference, or seminar. These folks made an effort to see JMP and got a chance to see what JMP can do which almost always impresses leads. I try to follow up with these folks as soon as possible while it is fresh in their mind.
- I then think demo downloads for researchers or any faculty at non-licensed schools are very important.
- Which leads are least important, maybe to nurture?
- Student leads. We are looking into having an automated email go out to student leads for follow-up.
- JMP registrants if they are at a licensed school. Whitepapers and webcasts for folks who are at licensed schools get minimum follow-up. A mass e-mail maybe or a standard e-mail.
- How to follow up dependent on lead source and last action?
- Call any web request for license or non-license schools, email follow-up if not available.
- Try to call folks from non-licensed schools, leave a quick message and follow-up via e-mail.
- Faculty and staff at licensed schools I tend to send a quick e-mail.
- Any other rules to determine follow ups, e.g. professor, teaching, user?
- I definitely follow-up on Web Requests and Conference leads first.
- Then with other leads follow-up with licensed vs non-licensed schools.
- If it's a researcher I try to push the JMP Pro license but they prefer the perpetual license.
- I go more by licensed vs. non-licensed school as some leads don't have titles or titles can be generic.
- I try to tailor response/conversation based on title. For example, if it is a staff member or institutional researcher I mention our new Admin license.
- How to automate and become more efficient?
- Good question and open to ideas.
- We are already looking into sending an automated response to students.
- A great start last year is our leads are categorized by titles. We tend to focus on professor and researchers first.
- Would be very useful to 'force' title choice for incoming leads so they must chose between "Student", "Researcher", "Teacher" and "Staff/IT". (Paolo)
- Other best practices?
- All of the above kind of sums up my activities.
- Basically I try to reach out to all faculty, researchers, professors at licensed and non-licensed schools just to provide a point of contact for questions.
- I try more ways of getting in touch with non-licensed schools, and based on type of lead.
- I think it is a best practice to Google researcher and professor names before calling them. I often find useful information about their background, their past and current projects and even their knowledge of other statistical tools. This is definitely an icebreaker when talking with them. (Paolo)
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Questioning strategies for prospects: Which questions help in which context, what do you typically ask during a call?
- One of the first questions I ask to non-license schools professors/researchers is "How did you find out JMP?" becaue I need to know more about their context to decide what to say next.
- At the end of a call or even better when a sale is done, I usually ask "Who else in your department/campus could take advantage of a tool like JMP in your opinion?" to get fresh prospect names. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't but it is always worth to trying! (Paolo)
- I try to understand which is the application area they are interested into and I always ask something like "Which statistical software are you currently using for Doe (or to model your data, etc?". (Paolo)
- Depending on the person on the other side of the phone, sometimes I ask to teachers "How your student would feel to learn statistics and have fun at the same time?". (Paolo)
- And of course budget is an important but also delicate question. I try to be kind and quite direct at the same time "How do you feel about our fees? Do you think your administration could help you getting this license?" (Paolo)
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See also attached "SFDC Academic Lead Scoring.pdf", shared by Curt on April 1st. This shows what was tried to use for academic lead scoring in SFDC. Current implementation in SFDC can be different.
