When people are first starting to implement inbound marketing, they’re primarily worried about getting enough leads into the funnel.
But once you have a lot of leads, you need to figure out those who are truly attracted to your product and who’s just starting to research.
That’s where lead scoring comes in.
What Is Lead Scoring?
The process of scoring leads is the method of assigning a value, usually in the form of numerical “points,” to each lead that you generate for your business. You can score your leads using a variety attributes such as the professional information they’ve provided to you as well as the way they’ve interacted through your website and brand across the internet. This method aids sales and marketing teams prioritize leads, handle them with appropriate responses, and increase the rate at which those leads turn into customers.
Every business has its own method of assigning points to score their leads, but one of the most commonly used methods is to utilize data from previous leads to build an assessment system.
How? In the beginning, examine your contacts who became customers to find out what they share. Next, you’ll look at the characteristics of those who did not become customers. After looking at the data from both sides you can decide which attributes ought to be weighed heavily according to how likely they are to suggest that someone is a good fit for your service.
Lead scoring sounds simple isn’t it? Based on the business model you’re using and the leads that you store in your database, it can quickly become a bit complicated. To make the process a little easier on you, we’re going to guide you through the fundamentals of creating a lead’s score, which includes what information you should be looking at for the most important characteristics, and the method of formulating a basic score.
Lead Scoring Models
Lead scoring models guarantee that the values the lead is assigned are based on the actual compatibility they have to your products. A lot of lead scores are based on a range of points from 0 to 100, but every model that created will help to improve an individual characteristic of your primary customer.
Here are six lead scoring models based upon the type of information that you gather from individuals who are involved with your business
1. Demographic Information
Are you only selling to people of a certain segment, like parents of young children or CIOs? You can ask questions about your demographic on the forms on your landing pages, and then use the responses of your prospects to see how well they match with the people you want to reach.
One option you could make with this data is to eliminate those who aren’t in your sales team’s queue by subtracting points for people who belong to the same category that you don’t sell to. In the case of example, if you sell only to a certain geographic location and you’re able to give the lead a negative score if it’s a lead that doesn’t belong to the appropriate city or state, zip code, country, and so on.
If any of your form fields are merely optional (like the number of a phone, for example) You could award points to those who fill in that option information anyway.
2. Company Information
If you’re a B2B business, are you more looking to sell to organizations that are of a particular size, type, or industry? Are you more interested in B2B companies or B2C organisations? Ask questions like these on your landing page forms as well, to award points to leads who fit in with your target people and also remove points from leads that aren’t at all what you’re looking for.
3. Online Behavior
The way a potential customer interacts with your website can tell you a lot about the level of interest they are in buying from you. Take a look at your leads that ultimately become customers: Which offers were downloaded by them? What was the number of offers they download? Which pages as well as how many- did they visit on your website prior to becoming a customer?
Both the quantity and type of forms and pages are crucial. You may provide higher lead scores to those who have visited pages with high value (like the pricing page) or completed high-value forms (like a demo request). Similarly, you might give higher scores to leads who had 30 page views on your website instead of three.
What about leads who’ve changed their behavior in the past? If the lead has stopped coming to your site or downloading your offer They might not be in the market anymore. You might take points away from leads that haven’t been engaging with your website after a certain amount of time. The amount of time -10 days, 30 days, 90 days depends on your sales cycle.
4. Email Engagement
If an individual has chosen to receive email from your business but you don’t know how interested that person is in purchasing products from your company. Open and clickthrough rates on the other hand, will give you more of a picture of the level of interest. Sales personnel will want to know who opened each email in your lead nurturing program, or who has always clicked through your offer promotion emails. So, they can look for leads who seem most engaged. You could also assign more points to those who open important emails, like demonstration offers.
5. Social Engagement
How active a lead with your company’s brand on social media sites can also give you the idea on how interested they are. How many times did they visit your company’s Facebook and tweets posts? How many times did they retweet or share the posts? If your customers are active on social media platforms and you are interested in giving points to leads who have specific Klout scores or the number of followers.
6. Spam Detection
Last but not least, you might want to give negative points to those who submitted forms for landing pages in a way that suggests they’re spam. For instance, was the first name, last name, and/or company name not capitalized? Did the lead fill in certain fields on forms by typing the letters of four or more within the standard “QWERTY” wording side-by-side?
You may also want to consider the types of email addresses people use compared to the email addresses of your customers base. If you’re selling to business like this it is possible to remove points from those who have a Gmail as well as a Yahoo! email address.
How do you know what Matters Most?
That’s a lot of data to sort through — how do you determine which data matters most? Should you seek out information from your sales team? Should you interview your customers? Should you dig deeper into your analytics and run couple of reports?
Actually, we recommend using a mix between all three. Customers, salespeople and your analytics reports will assist you in determining which information is most effective to convert leads into customers, which will help you add certain elements to certain offers email, offers, and so on.
Talk to your sales team.
Sales reps are the ones in the field, communicating directly with leads that have turned into customers as well as those who weren’t. They tend to have an idea about which marketing materials can help in promoting conversion.
Which blog posts and special offers do your sales reps prefer to share with leads? You may find some of them saying “Every time I send people this particular document, it makes it more easy to close the deal.” This is a valuable piece of information. Find out what these collateral items are and assign points accordingly.
Talk to your customers.
Although your sales team may say that certain content is effective in converting customers, you may find that the people who participated in the sales process differ on the subject. This is fine. You’re entitled to hear on both sides.
Do a few interviews with customers to understand what they believe was responsible for their decision to purchase from you. Make sure to interview customers with short and long sales cycles, so that you can get diverse perspectives.
Go to the analytics.
Also, you should supplement all this in-person research with hard information from your marketing analytics.
Conduct an attribution analysis to figure out what marketing initiatives result in conversions across the funnel. Do not only focus on the content that converts leads to customers. What happens to the content people see before they are a lead? You may award a specific number of points to people who download content that’s traditionally transformed leads into leads, and a higher number of points to those who download content that’s historically changed people into clients.
Another approach to make sense of the valuable information on your website is to conduct a contacts report. A report on contacts will tell the number of contactsand the amount of revenue has been produced as a result of specific, targeted marketing actions. Marketing activities might include certain offer downloads, email campaign clickthroughs, and so on. Keep track of what activities are most likely to be first-touch conversions or last-touch conversions and so on and then assign points accordingly.
Is One Lead Score Enough?
If you only have one primary client at present it’s enough to get a single score. But as your business expands and expands, you’ll be able to sell to more audiences. It could be expanding into new areas, product lines and even create new personas. You could even be focusing more on up-selling and cross-selling to existing customers, instead of pursuing new ones. If your contacts aren’t “one size will fit all” your scoring system shouldn’t either.
With some marketing platforms, you can create several lead scoring systems, giving you the option of evaluating various sets of contacts in various ways. Unsure of how to create several scores? Here are a few suggestions that can help:
Fit vs. Interest
For example that your sales team needs to determine whether customers are the quality and fit (i.e. is a contact in the right area? The right industry? The right function?) and their level of interest (e.g. how engaged have they been in your or other content?). If both of these factors are important, you can create both an engagement score as well as a fit score, so you can focus your outreach to people whose value is high in both areas.
Multiple Personas
Say you’re a software company that sells two different types of software, with different sales teams, to different types of buyers. You could create two different lead scores — one for a buyer’s fit as well as the other one based on their interest in each software. The, you’d use these respective scores to route leads to the appropriate sales teams.
New Business vs. Up-sell
As you expand and expand, you could begin to pay attention to up-sell or cross-sell in the same way as new business. Keep in mind the signals that signify the high-quality prospects as well as existing customers often look completely different.
If you are a prospect, take a look at demographics or website engagement, whereas for existing customers, you might take a look at the number of customer support tickets they’ve filed and their interaction with an onboarding advisor, and how active they currently are with your offerings. If these buy signals appear different to different types of sales, you might want to create multiple lead scores.
There are many methods to calculate a lead score. The easiest method to calculate it is:
Manual Lead Scoring
1. Calculate the conversion rate from lead to customer of all of your leads.
The conversion rate for your leads to customers is the same as the number of new customers you get divided by the amount of leads you generate. This conversion rate can serve as your standard.
2. Select and pick different attributes customers that you believe to be higher quality leads.
Customers could have had requested a trial offer at some point in time, or clients in the financial industry, or customers with between 10 and 20 employees.
There’s a certain art in choosing the features to include in your model. It’s from the conversations with your sales team, your analytics and other factors, but overall, it’s a judgment call. Five different people do the same exercise, and they could create five different solutions. However, that’s fine as you make sure that your score is dependent on the information you mentioned earlier.
3. Calculate the individual close rates of each of those aspects.
The calculation of the closing rates for each type of action the user takes on your website — or the kind of user taking that step — is essential since it will determine the steps you’ll take as a response.
Therefore, determine how many people become qualified leads (and ultimately customers) based on the actions they make or who they are in relationship to your main customer. You’ll use these close rates to actually “score” your leads during the next step.
4. Compare the close rates of each attribute to your overall close rate, and assign point values accordingly.
Find attributes with close rates that are significantly greater than your overall close rate. Choose which attributes to award points to, and If so, how many points. The point value of each attribute based on the size of their individual close rates.
The actual points awarded will be a little arbitrary However, you must try to make it as consistent as you can. For instance, if your overall close rate is 1%, and that your “requested demo” close rate is 20 percent, then the close percentage of your “requested demo” attribute is 20 times your overall close rate -that is, for example, you could as an example, give lead with 20 points based on these attributes.
Logistic Regression Lead Scoring
The simplest method, as mentioned below, to calculate the lead score is a great starting point. However the most mathematically sound option is to use an approach to data mining that includes logistic regression.
Data mining methods are more complicated, and often more intuitive to close rates than you actually have as a result. Logistic regression involves creating an Excel formula Excel that will give you the chance that a lead will close to becoming a customer. It’s much more accurate than the approach we’ve discussed in the previous paragraphs because it’s a comprehensive approach that takes into account how all of the aspects of the customer’s profile — such as industry, company size and whether the person requested a trialall interact.
Predictive Lead Scoring
Making a lead score will make a big difference to your business. It can help improve the lead-handoff process, boost lead conversion rates and increase productivity of reps, and many more. But, as you can see from the two methods previously mentioned, figuring out an effective scoring system is an extremely time-consuming process when it is done manually.
In addition, establishing the scoring guidelines isn’t “set to forget.” When you receive the feedback of your staff members and test your scores, you’ll need to modify your lead-scoring system on frequent basis to ensure it’s accurate. What to have technology take the manual setup and keep altering, leaving your team with more time to establish relationships with your customers?
That’s the reason predictive scoring is so important. Predictive scoring makes use of machine learning to parse through hundreds of data points to find your top leads, so you don’t need to. Predictive scoring analyzes what information your customers have in common in addition to what the leads who weren’t closed have in common and then comes up with the formula to sort your contacts based on their potential to be customers. This allows your sales team and you to sort leads in a way that you’re not contacting people who aren’t (yet) engaged and engaging the ones who do.
The best part about predictive scoring? Like any other application to machine learning, the predicted score will become more accurate over time, so your lead follow-up strategy will optimize itself.