Learn about building a lead / person scoring program

Marketing organizations are continually looking for ways to improve the quality and readiness of the leads they deliver to sales organizations. No marketer wants to send a lead to sales who has shown interest but isn’t yet ready to buy. Leads scoring is probably the most effective method for helping to identify qualified leads who are approaching or are in the buying stage. Lead scoring can help you determine the sales readiness of your leads which not only helps you craft your marketing messages but also helps improve the efficiency and productivity of your sales team. Determining your best customer through a scoring can help you focus your marketing and dramatically increase your win rate.

Before we talk about lead scoring we should talk about leads. When we say lead, we’re talking about any person in your database who has shown interest in your products or services, someone who is a potential customer or client. Now what is lead scoring? Lead or people scoring is a way of quantifying leads so that you can measure how ready they are to hand off to sales. Lead scoring tracks lead’s actions and attributes and assigns a point value to each of them. Think of a lead’s actions as the behaviors they demonstrate when interacting with things like your emails, forms, web properties and webinars. You can track visits to specific properties as well as how often the lead visits them in a given period of time. Think of a lead’s attributes as their demographics, things like their job level, industry, the country they work in, the size of their organization, the name of their department, and so forth. Scoring can be used for a number of things such as determining a prospect’s level of interest in your business, ranking the prospect’s demographics to determine if they fit your target customer profile or just counting the number of times in action was taken like visiting a webpage or clicking a link in an email.

Here’s how lead scoring works. Each time you get new demographic information about a lead, a point value is added to that lead score. The same thing happens when you get new behavioral information about them. Over time, more and more points are added to each lead score and eventually they reach a score threshold. This is where the true value of lead scoring comes into play. Any lead who reaches or exceeds your threshold can be acted on automatically. For example, when a lead reaches a score of 50, their status in the scoring system is set to marketing qualified and an alert is sent to sales indicating that the lead is approaching the buying stage.

Let’s think in terms of how lead scoring applies to you. According to a raintoday.com report anyone who qualifies as a lead may end up purchasing your goods or services but only about 25% of new leads are actually sales ready. Some companies have found that a 10% increase in lead quality can translate into a 40% increase in sales productivity. By scoring leads, you can measure how qualified they are and set criteria for when they’re past the sales. That way sales can focus on the leads that are most likely to close and marketing can continue to nurture the remaining leads until they’re ready.

Now that you know reasons to use lead scoring let’s go over how you can develop a scoring model that works for you. To start, you need to identify the problem you’re trying to solve. Do you have a volume issue where you need to get sales more qualified leads? Do you have a quality issue where your sales team is wasting their time engaging with leads that aren’t ready? Or do you have a long sales cycle that you’re trying to shorten? Once you decide on the issues, you can design a scoring model that supports the business objectives you want to achieve. With the issues defined, you need to align sales and marketing objectives to identify the behaviors and demographics you want to track. Decide which ones are worth more than others and assign a score value to each. For example, you might determine that a lead whose job title is director or vice president has 10 points added to their score whereas a manager or below gets only five points. And when they visit your pricing page their scoring increases by 12 points, but they only get seven points when they visit your company’s homepage. Don’t forget to consider channels in your scoring. As an example, let’s consider two different leads. One receives an email, directing them to a landing page where they complete a form before they can access gated content. The other lead arrives at the same landing page but as a result of a pay per click campaign. Because of this difference in behavior your organization might assign a higher score to the lead who performed the search due to their stronger interest in your company. Another area to consider is score decay. Score decay or negative scoring reduces over-inflated scores and brings down scores as buyer intent changes. For example, when someone moves out of active buying mode you can reduce their score using a set value or a percent value. With your scores defined, now you can identify what the scores signify when they reach different thresholds and what actions to take. For example, a lead with a score of zero to 20 could be classified as a cold lead or even a non fit and is removed from your program. A lead with a score between 21 and 49 could be considered warm and continues in your nurture program. And a lead with a score of 50 and above is considered a hot lead, ready to be contacted by sales. Here’s an example of a lead scoring model developed by a sales and marketing team. Looking at the model which separates demographic and behavioral scores, you can see that a lead whose job title is V.P. or director gets 12 points whereas visitors with a title of manager receive only seven points. Similarly, you can see that someone who visits a pricing page gets 10 points but if they watch a webinar they receive only seven points. From the model, you can get an idea of what contributes to a marketing qualified lead as defined by this sales and marketing team.

With your model defined, the next step is to build the programs and smart campaigns in Marketo that automate the running and tracking of your lead scoring system. Be sure to validate that leads past to sales are actually qualified leads. This helps determine if your scoring model is accurate. To do this, you can run reports of actual leads accepted by the sales team and see if they mirror your new high quality lead definition. If they don’t match, revisit the behaviors and demographics and adjust your definitions until you get them working how you want them. With lead scoring, you can’t set it and forget it. You should plan on reviewing the accuracy of your model at least once per quarter and adjust your scores and thresholds as needed.

So now that you have your lead scoring program designed and implemented, let’s talk about some of the return on investment you should be seeing. The first thing you’ll probably see is an increase in lead to opportunity conversions. Sales will focus on the leads most likely to buy, closing more and producing more revenue for the company. Just a note, you must capture this before and after metric to compare results and demonstrate this value. You may also see an increase in sales velocity. The sales cycle typically starts when a lead becomes sales ready and goes until a purchase is made. Higher quality leads typically require less sales effort and close faster. So you’re likely to see faster sales cycles. To measure these improvements directly, you’ll need to capture the typical sales cycle time before and after lead scoring. We recommend revisiting this metric each time you optimize your lead scoring model to measure the ongoing impact. Finally, you’ll notice an increase in overall sales productivity. You can measure how much revenue is being generated by each salesperson before and after lead scoring. If you’re not currently measuring how your salespeople spend their time, you may want to do an informal survey to find out before lead scoring is implemented. The increase here will be the ultimate measure of how successful lead scoring is for your organization. Now that you’ve learned about lead scoring and how it can benefit your organization let’s learn how to set up, use, and manage lead scoring in Marketo. -