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.

Which Part of the Funnel Should You Focus On

What do you have control over? If you don't have any input into how SEO/SEM works for your company or maybe inbound leads are driven by a 3rd party, you should probably not fret over the top of the funnel where potential buyers coming into your marketing+sales cycle.

Scenario:

Zoho: Lead Funnel example

You don't have any problem with inbound leads. In fact, there are so many, it makes you want to not care about all these marginally interested people who want to check out your website. But, you should care if your industry has a finite number of prospective decision makers with budget authority.

After a lead converts to becoming a prospect, where the prospective buyer has expressed some sort of hand raising (e.g., downloading a white paper, signing up for a sales demo, setting up an appointment with a sales rep, or scheduling an on-site consult), that's when it gets tricky to a) define the handshake sign-off between marketing's lead nurturing (MQL) and sales' rationale for considering a prospect as a sales qualified lead (SQL).

In reality, many leads get stuck in the middle of the funnel. The only part where a marketer can really focus on first is the middle with tactics such as marketing automation to help further entice the customer to give out his/her BANT (budget, authority, need, and timing).

You can only write and deploy so many touchpoints before a prospect marks your communications as spam or simply unsubscribes even though they were so close (according to their lead score) to becoming a paid subscriber.