A Guide to Successful Lead Scoring
Congratulations! Your lead generation efforts are garnering results, filling your sales pipeline with potential customers. The next obvious step is to discern which leads should be fast-tracked and nurtured toward closing. If you’re looking for recommendations on which lead scoring systems are best, you’ve landed on the wrong article. In my opinion, purchasing a dedicated lead scoring solution is akin to throwing money away. Rather than spending money on a black box, I’ve found that spending time and energy on using your existing business logic to score your leads with your existing data is a better place to start. Even if you’ve purchased a dedicated solution, this article still provides advice on how to get the most out of your investment.
What Is Lead Scoring Anyway? (H)
Here’s a rather boring (albeit accurate) definition of lead scoring:
“Lead scoring is a shared methodology between sales and marketing to rank prospects based on their sales readiness, specifically interest shown of your business and their current place in the buying cycle. The result lead score is used to determine the priority order in which leads are managed.”
Essentially lead scoring helps organizations identify qualified leads that are most likely to become a viable prospect. Since time and resources are often limited, scoring provides a framework to maximize efforts on deals with the greatest potential for the organization. Due to its nature, lead scoring also encourages sales and marketing to work together, focusing them on creating and nurturing leads that drive revenue. Since sales and marketing can have a contentious dynamic, playing nicely together toward a common goal is a big plus.
What It Isn’t (H)
Systemized cherry picking of leads in a database. A stand-alone process. Impervious to organizational needs and market conditions. You get my drift.
Climb Aboard the Demand Gen & Lead Scoring Statistics Bandwagon (H)
The following is the obligatory litany of demand generation and lead scoring statistics (thank you HubSpot, VentureHarbour, and DemandGenReport) you may need to convince your boss to invest in demand generation automation and lead scoring projects.
92% of B2B marketers now have an ABM program, and 68% use automation
48% of businesses say most of their leads requires “long cycle” nurturing with many influencers
34.1% of businesses don’t use any attribution model to measure marketing performance
29% of brands nurture their existing customers beyond the initial purchase
57% of marketers say lead nurturing is the most valuable features of automation software
Now let’s put our common sense hats on… you want to spend organizational dollars nurturing leads that have the greatest likelihood of adding value to your bottomline. Excellent, let’s move on.
Special Software Need Not Apply. Be Agile Instead. (H)
You don’t need to add special lead scoring software to your existing martech stack. I advocate starting your lead scoring project with the data you already have rather than chasing after data you may get. My RevOps approach centers around the idea that scoring is simply a way to measure behavior in real time rather than some larger, more convoluted and overly complex strategy. It doesn’t have to be that hard. Really.
Rather than special lead scoring software, you do need:
A willingness to change your scoring rubric based on real-world results
Contingency plans for things when they inevitably go awry. For example, what do you do if reps are already working their maximum-allotted leads or their account-based book of business? Imagine the next “super hot” lead lands in your funnel. What now?
Clarity that lead scoring should be in service around organizational goals and not the other way around
What does lead scoring agility look like?
Being prescriptive if the score is a bigger number. You work this lead first because it describes the behavior based on criteria you deemed important. Think about what if your sales team doesn’t work the hottest account. What are the consequences?
Using a descriptive feedback loop. This requires self examination and where you describe your results. If you don’t like it, change it. Don’t be a slave to the process. You aid the sales process rather than dictate it.
Monitoring your target audience’s actual behavior. If they aren’t behaving as predicted, what needs to change in your scoring model. Is it the right audience or do you need to change to follow where the market is going?
Building & Implementing Lead Scoring (H)
While every organization is unique (yes you’re a snowflake because of the technologies you employ, the services/products you sell, and how you’re structured), the steps in creating a lead scoring model are fairly straightforward.
Define Your Ideal Buyer
Marketing 101, right? Most likely you have personas already. If not, create them. Look for common characteristics shared by your best customers. Questions to ask, ponder and find answers: What are the chief attributes of the companies they work for? Who has the decision-making authority? What fields do your sales team look at first to determine the lead’s potential?
Talk to Sales & Customers
Certainly not a novel concept but one that too many organizations don’t utilize: taking into consideration the opinions and experiences of sales and your customer base. Ask sales about the content they routinely send to potential customers during the sales process, it’s consumption and impact to pipeline velocity. Ask customers about the factors that ultimately won them over. What finally influenced their decision? Getting this feedback could be as simple as a survey for a nominal gift (who doesn’t love a free cup of coffee) or as in-depth as a phone interview.
Traits & Actions
This step is all about defining the traits and actions that eventually lead to a closed deal. If found these sub-steps elicit better scoring models:
A Hypothesis to Test: create a theory based on your experience complete with explicit assumptions. Here are some examples. I believe that a whitepaper download is more important than an email. Webinar attendance is less valuable than a demo request form. Sometimes it’s easier to write out what you’re testing when it’s in plain English. Formulate your hypothesis first, then assign points based on a sanity check.
Assign Points to Attributes: Create a list of attributes, assign criteria and allocate point values to things like company size, job title/seniority, location, industry, age, etc.
Assign Points to Behaviors: Most likely you already have a list of desired behaviors that signal purchase readiness and interest. Examples are webinar attendance, downloads, email opens, free trial requests, demo requests, form submissions, social media engagement, email subscriptions. Assign point values to these behaviors relative to each other.
Analyze Your Analytics
Dig into your content conversion rates and past marketing campaigns. Look at your sales follow-up emails conversion rates. Get creative and comprehensively look at your organization’s analytical ecosystem. Hopefully you’re measuring what matters. If you’re not… whelp, that’s another problem you absolutely need to solve.
Add Lead Score Model Into Automation Platform
This is the easiest part. I’ll leave the how-to part to your software’s training videos and documentation.
A/B Testing
Rarely do you get the model right perfectly the first time. For example, if you have multiple product lines, the buying path may be slightly different even if your products share the same target market. The buying path may be different. Systematized A/B testing can work out the modeling kinks and create a habit of optimizing (creating a hypothesis, implementing a minor change, measuring results, rinse & repeat).
Not So Fast, We’re Not Done
Now that you’ve built and implemented your lead scoring… it’s time to strategically review and summarize your results. Here’s an example:
For all of Q3 we tested this lead scoring hypothetical: [insert hypothesis statement]. In that period of time we generated [insert $] of pipeline value of which [insert $] turned into Annual Recurring Revenue [insert closed value]. Of that closed value, we can now organize lead score values [insert natural breaks in the data aka Jenks like 0-25, 26-50, 51-89, 80-100] and assign a closed percentage number. This calculation will either confirm or challenge your lead scoring veracity.
Support Your Path For Growth
My last piece of advice on lead scoring is to not reinvent the wheel. Lead scoring doesn’t require special software. It does require examination of what’s currently working and what’s not with regard to your marketing, pipeline, sales nurturing, and deal closing processes. If you’d like a guide on your lead scoring journey, Alternative Partners can help you navigate the process. We’ve helped many organizations plan for growth with our RevOps Services. You can also read our RevOps success stories.