Lead Scoring

What is lead scoring and how can it help my marketing campaign performance or making the handshake between a marketing qualified lead (MQL) to a sales qualified lead (SQL) better? I imagine this comes up quite a bit because this list of topics comes up from a simple browser search for lead scoring.

• Definition
• Best Practices & Examples
• Systems & Software

Definition. Lead scoring is used to identify a prospect or customer's inclination and interest level towards a sale of your product or services. A customer downloading a whitepaper or case study from your website is an indication of interest; though just one touch point is not enough for you to make a sale. Scoring methodology typically comes with more robust email marketing and marketing automation platforms, such as Pardot/Salesforce Sales Cloud, ExactTarget/Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot, Marketo, or Eloqua. Lead scoring gives marketers a way to rank, prioritize, and measure sales leads in order to close a sale. It is typically packaged with email marketing since prospect or customer interest is easily gauged from opens/clicks/interactions/and other web-based actions.

Best Practices. Is there a best way of setting up your lead scoring models? Some platforms only allow one model to run at any given time (looking at you Silverpop). While other platforms use a combination of a numeric and letter scores to attribute rank to leads; with an automated numeric value and/or letter grade that indicates a prospects need or interest in speaking with sales. Aside from the technical setup, speaking with your sales team on what creates the Ah ha! moment for a customer may help you identify when a lead goes from cold to warm to hot. 

Simply creating a campaign that drives prospects to sign up for a demo of your product might not be a best practice; but a marketer's campaign follow-through with additional messaging about how the demo was, when and if a prospect is willing to purchase the product after demoing it is a necessary step to making this action a best practice. Marketing could certainly say that they generated 5,000 SQLs this quarter and it's not their fault that Sales couldn't close a single one. This is why speaking with your sales team is an imperative step in creating best practices for your marketing campaigns.

The unicorn in this scenario is a Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) that covers all of what sales is looking for before starting to close a lead...a prospect's BANT (budget, authority, needs, and timeline). Lead scoring can certainly help you identify who these people are in your database. For every marketing question that a prospect responds to in some positive way, there should be an attributed numeric value that adds to a prospect's lead score.

A cleaner view of who the prospect is (+1 point for each completed field):

• Contact Name (First, Last, Salutation)
• Contact Phone (direct or mobile)
• Contact Title or Contact Role
• Contact Postal Address
• Contact Company
• Contact Email Address
• Contact Web URL

For most contact records, this will already have a starting score of 1-5 when a prospect joins your database through a web form for a demo, webinar, whitepaper/case study, or general inquiry contact us form.

I'd recommend at least +5 points for any of these firmographic fields:

• Industry
• Number of Employees
• Annual revenue
• Number of locations
• Sales cycle stage
• Decision maker(s)
• HQ or branch location

And, +50 to +100 points for these types of customer hand raising:

• Prospect downloads a Demo
• Sales call to setup/walkthrough product/service demo
• Prospect's BANT

Basically, the higher the lead score, the more likely they are going to purchase from you. If you use a progressive web forms, a feature of both Pardot and Hubspot, you can gradually get all the contact or firmographic information you want from a prospect who repeatedly comes to your website for content and/or information without having an epic long web contact form at the start.

However, giving a negative score for prospects who are not ready to buy is not the way to reset a prospect's score. An example of this: a K-5 math software company's lead scoring method was to give -100 points to prospects who didn't purchase after a product demo instead of resetting a prospect's score to 0 or some lower number below 50. This made it impossible for prospects who had gone through a demo (but didn't have the budget) to ever get back onto sales' radar.

Systems. You are unlikely to find a lead scoring system outside of email marketing software made for demand or lead generation such as HubSpot, Salesforce/Pardot/ExactTarget, Marketo, Act-On, etc. These are all comparable with each other in terms of triggering marketing or sales messaging, or alerting sales professionals, of a prospect's lead score when prospects take hand raising actions.

Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics are metrics that are easy to track but don't necessarily tell you anything about the performance of your business. Here are some examples of vanity web metrics:

• Pageviews: The number of times a page on your website is viewed. This metric doesn't tell you anything about how engaged visitors are with your content.
• Unique visitors: The number of different people who visit your website. This metric doesn't tell you anything about how often visitors come back to your website.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. This metric doesn't tell you anything about why visitors are leaving your website.
• Social media followers: The number of people who follow you on social media. This metric doesn't tell you anything about how engaged your followers are with your content.
• Likes and shares: The number of times your content is liked or shared on social media. This metric doesn't tell you anything about how people are interacting with your content.

It's important to note that vanity metrics can be misleading. For example, a high number of pageviews could simply mean that your website is easy to find, not that people are actually interested in your content. Similarly, a high number of unique visitors could simply mean that people are visiting your website once and then never coming back.

Examples of vanity metrics for email marketing:

• Number of subscribers: This is the total number of people who have opted in to receive your emails. While this is an important metric to track, it doesn't tell you anything about how engaged your subscribers are with your emails.
• Open rate: This is the percentage of subscribers who open your emails. This metric is often used as a measure of the success of your email campaigns, but it can be misleading. For example, a high open rate could simply mean that your subject lines are eye-catching, not that your subscribers are actually interested in the content of your emails.
• Click-through rate: This is the percentage of subscribers who click on a link in your email. This metric is also often used as a measure of the success of your email campaigns, but it can be misleading as well. For example, a high click-through rate could simply mean that your links are well-placed, not that your subscribers are actually interested in the content of your emails.
• Conversion rate: This is the percentage of subscribers who take a desired action, such as making a purchase, after reading your email. This is a much more important metric to track than open rate or click-through rate, as it tells you how effective your emails are at driving results.
• Unsubscribe rate: This is the percentage of subscribers who unsubscribe from your email list. A high unsubscribe rate could be a sign that your emails are not relevant to your subscribers or that they are being sent too frequently.

It's important to note that vanity metrics can be misleading. For example, a high open rate or click-through rate could simply mean that your subject lines are eye-catching or that your links are well-placed, not that your subscribers are actually interested in the content of your emails.