Marketing Foundations: Lead Scoring 101
In our Marketing Foundations series, we’ll define and explore today’s most important marketing topics.
This series is designed to help marketing leaders understand the latest trends, and each article is packed with helpful tips for bringing these topics to life for your company.
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is a marketing technique that aims to assess the quality of leads in a database, with the goal of identifying the most promising prospects.
The process of lead scoring typically involves evaluating various aspects of a lead's profile, behavior, and engagement with the brand.
Two of the most common types of lead scoring are demographic and behavioral scoring.
Demographic scoring: This type of scoring evaluates a lead's characteristics, such as their job title, company size, industry, location, and other relevant demographics. The goal is to identify leads that match the ideal customer profile (ICP) or buyer persona. This type of scoring helps businesses prioritize leads that are more likely to become customers and tailor their marketing messages accordingly.
Behavioral scoring: This type of scoring assesses a lead's interactions with the brand, such as website visits, email opens, clicks, form submissions, social media engagement, and other actions. The more engaged a lead is with the brand, the higher their score will be. This type of scoring helps businesses identify leads who are actively interested in their products or services and are more likely to convert.
While there are other types of lead scoring - such as fit scoring, intent scoring, and predictive scoring - behavioral and demographic scoring are two of the most used methods.
By combining these two approaches, businesses can get a more complete picture of a lead's potential to become a customer.
It's important to note that lead scoring requires a collaborative effort between sales and marketing teams.
Both parties must agree on the criteria and weighting for each type of scoring to ensure that the process is aligned with the company's overall sales and marketing goals.
With the right approach to lead scoring, businesses can improve their sales efficiency, increase revenue, and build stronger relationships with their customers.
Why is lead scoring important?
Lead scoring is a valuable tool for companies because it allows them to:
Focus on the leads that are most likely to convert: By prioritizing leads based on their likelihood of converting, sales teams can focus their efforts on the most promising opportunities.
Streamline the sales process: By using lead scoring to identify the most promising leads, sales teams can streamline the sales process by reducing the volume of leads they need to target. This allows them to focus their efforts on higher-quality leads, which can help to shorten the sales cycle and lower the overall cost of sales.
Improve lead nurturing: By understanding which leads are most likely to convert, companies can tailor their lead nurturing efforts to focus on the needs and interests of those leads, which can improve the effectiveness of their lead nurturing campaigns.
Optimize revenue: By focusing on the leads that are most likely to convert, companies can improve their sales results and increase their revenue.
10 steps to implementing a lead scoring model
A well-executed lead scoring model enables businesses to prioritize and focus marketing and sales efforts on the most promising leads, making it an essential component of any inbound marketing strategy.
Here are our recommendations for implementing an effective lead scoring model:
Determine the problem you're trying to solve: Identify the specific pain points in your sales process that a lead scoring model can address. This could include issues like the sales team being inundated with too many leads, not having enough leads, or not seeing high enough conversion rates.
Use data to inform your scoring model: Collect data on your leads and use it to determine which behaviors or characteristics are most strongly correlated with conversion. This will help you develop a more accurate and effective scoring model.
Align sales and marketing: It is crucial to bring together key stakeholders from both sales and marketing teams to collaboratively identify pain points in lead management, agree on ideal customer profiles, and determine the desired outcomes of the scoring model. This joint effort ensures the effectiveness of the model and garners support by both teams. Additionally, it is noteworthy that this collaboration helps in identifying the appropriate volume of leads required for optimizing the model to suit your business needs.
Define your ideal customer profile: Start by identifying the characteristics of your ideal customer, such as industry, company size, and job title. This will help you focus on leads that match your target audience.
Determine the scoring criteria: Decide which behaviors or characteristics of a lead indicate that they are more likely to become a customer. This could include factors like job title, company size, website activity, and social media engagement.
Assign point values: Assign a point value to each scoring criteria based on its level of importance. For example, a lead who has downloaded a whitepaper or attended a webinar may be worth more points than a lead who simply visited your website. By assigning higher point values to behaviors that indicate a stronger interest in your products or services, you can accurately prioritize leads for follow-up by your sales team.
Set a threshold: Decide on a score threshold that indicates when a lead is ready to be passed on to sales. This threshold should be based on your sales team's capacity and the amount of time and resources required to nurture a lead. This is a key factor in pushing conversion rates. Determining the sweet spot will require some trial and error, but we need a starting point in order to move to the next step.
Test and refine: Once you have implemented your lead scoring model, test it to see how well it works. Continuously monitor and adjust your model. Keep track of how your leads are moving through the sales funnel. Refine the scoring criteria and point values as necessary to ensure that it accurately predicts and reflects the changing needs of your business and customers.
Train your sales and marketing teams on the scoring model: Make sure both your sales and marketing teams understand how the scoring model works and how to use it effectively to prioritize leads and improve conversion rates. More importantly, make sure you’ve created a feedback loop so that the model continues to improve and align with marketing and sales needs.
Keep it simple: Resist the urge to make the lead scoring model too complex by trying to solve future issues. Focus on solving current pain points and build scalability as necessary. A very common mistake is over-complicating the model in the beginning, which can make it difficult to scale.
The bottom line on lead scoring
It’s good to mention that the lead scoring is a piece of the RevOps ecosystem - there are multiple things that are dependent on and are directly affected by this.
Usually, the sales process is considered to be the one with the more direct impact, and this could be true but there are other processes that should be also considered like lead nurturing and the content strategy.