5 Basics of Lead Scoring
March 23rd, 2010 | By Barbra Gago: Barbra Gago (@barbragago) is the Inbound & Social Marketing Manager for Genius.com.” Lead scoring can be a very complex process, consider this article an introduction to some of the basic concepts of lead scoring, and how it is used to manage your prospective customers as they move through the funnel and their level of interest in the solutions to their problems that your company provides changes.
The main objective of lead scoring is to rank prospective customers numerically based on their level of interest in order to empower the sales department with better actionable information about theprospective customers they are, or plan to engage with.
1. What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is a process that enables sales to identify more sales ready leads faster. It’s a qualification process of assigning a numeric value (or score) to leads to qualify or rank them according to their level of interest. Lead scoring allows sales to quickly identify promising prospects by simply checking their lead score.
2. What do I need before I start lead scoring?
It’s important that you have a universal “lead” definition that both Sales and Marketing agree on. There’s no sense in Marketing scoring leads to identify quality, if Marketing and Sales aren’t on the same page about what “quality” actually means.
3. Why should I score leads?
Assuming leads move through the funnel step-by-step, or even if they don’t you want to be able to track and adjust their lead quality as their behavior or interactions with your website and other content changes over time. With lead scoring, each action a lead takes can be counted differently, and ultimately add or subtract from their lead quality score, making them more or less promising as a prospect.
For example, when a prospect clicks through from a tweet to your blog do you want to assign them the same weight as a prospect that signs up for a recent webinar? Maybe do, maybe you don’t but either way, lead scoring will keep track of this behavior and keep score automatically.
4. What should I know?
Lead scoring is comprised of two parts: “explicit” and “implicit” information. While both types of data are equally important, implicit data tends to be more telling and thus may be worth more to the lead scorer. Explicit data is more of the “fit” of the prospect to your product, including attributes like; company, size, industry segment, job title, location, budget, authority and timing.
Implicit data on the other had is evident in the prospects digital body language; specific web pages visited, number of pages, recency of response, email activity, social media activity, or downloads of resources such as white papers or webinars.
5. What’s process like?
As each lead takes an action, their score changes (score will also change if lead is inactive). Marketing Automation can help here because it enables automatic re-scoring triggered by every action the prospect takes (that you’ve assigned a score to) otherwise you would have to do this manually.
For example, if A, B, or C defines “fit” with your buyer personas and 1, 2, 3, or 4 defines “engagement“, or digital body language, a combined score of A1 would be a prospect that has an ideal fit, and a maximum level of engagement. A prospect with a score of A4 might be the right fit, but has minimum engagement, and would be a good opportunity to funnel into a nurturing program until they have a higher engagement score. Prospects with scores more like C1 or D1 show very high engagement, but very low fit, this may be a prospect that is researching for a more senior decision maker, and worth your while to follow up with.
In the end, lead scoring can be highly effective at delivering sales with better qualified leads, but remember, if Marketing and Sales have not agreed on a “universal lead definition” true success is at risk. This process is highly effective when both Sales and Marketing have worked together to develop the definition of a qualified lead. So your first step is to start there. Find your sales counterpart, reach agreement, write it down, and begin your lead scoring project.” read more
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What’s Your Goal? More Leads or Better Leads? (Silverpop)
” In the latest study from Forrester Research, “Rethinking the B2B Tech Marketing Mix in the Digital Age,” more than 50 percent of marketers surveyed said generating more leads was their top challenge. That’s not at all surprising when you consider that gathering leads is the primary focus of most B2B marketing programs, but it’s important not to sacrifice quality for quantity. Unless you develop a process for managing leads, you’ll find it difficult to impact revenues.The first step to managing leads effectively is to analyze where they come from, what it takes to keep them interested and what additional information you need to give them to make the sale. Those kinds of critical insights are what puts a lead-management program a level or two above the rest and will be more likely to drive revenue results that will please you and your CEO.
Pushing leads into the top of the sales pipeline and then just letting them sit there is not going to get the results you’re seeking. Carlos Hidalgo, president of The Annuitas Group, noted: “I remember one client who told us that the 300-plus leads we had generated over a six-week period were no good. We implemented a ‘post campaign’ research project and identified that more than half of the leads never received any kind of follow-up. Of those, 90 percent ended up buying from our client’s competitors within a 90-day period. It’s hard to argue with statistics.”
The point is, you can drag all the suspects in the world into your pipeline, but unless you take the time to weed through them in a systematic manner and identify the hot ones from the cold, you’re only wasting your time, your marketing budget and the efforts of your sales team to track down opportunities.”
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