Lead Scoring at its best.

Lets start with, what is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is the method of assigning a numerical value to responses gathered during the lead qualification process.

Why should you do it?
You gather thousands of leads through online marketing, tradeshows, webinars, etc. Most of the times sales will cherry pick those they remember talking to and the rest, at best, will end up in your database. You invested thousands of dollars on these leads so it would be a shame not to get a return on your investment. Some organizations hire a telemarketing agency or have their inside sales team swift through the leads and find those qualified. However, after those leads are qualified the rest are forgotten, even though they may be qualified two months later. Thus, even if you have an inside sales team or telemarketing agency you can still benefit from scoring. Some organizations have some sort of marketing nurturing program in place but without scoring added it does not give the marketer the information they could accumulate via scoring, hence they can’t accurately identify those leads that starts to come to the surface and become qualified.

What works for most?
Imagine scoring as gathering information and monitoring interest regarding potential customers. What things would you be most interested to know about these potential customers? You are already gathering explicit data about them by asking for certain information during a tradeshow or when they register for a webinar. That explicit data can help you size the lead up. If certain countries, states, titles, job functions, etc. are more important than other and would make a lead more qualified than another then those should get a higher score than others. Be careful though, most organizations have the tendency to score every single field and field value they ever collected. The problem with this methodology is that you will have to set your score very high otherwise you will accumulate many leads that score high enough to qualify as a qualified lead even when they are not really qualified.

With marketing automation systems being able to monitor web activities (site visits) and campaign activities (open and click for example) implicit data is a large part of scoring. The same rule applies; do not start scoring every single page and activity. You will get higher quality leads if you are more selective. Select the pages that your organization feels would be the pages potential customers usually visit and or you think the interest in certain pages are indicative of a more qualified lead. As to campaign activities, many organizations decide against giving scores for opening an email. This is because marketing automation systems will note an email “open” even if the email just appeared in a preview pane but the individual did not actually click to open the email. The best way to monitor campaigns is to monitor the “clicked on link” – specific link you meant to be your “call to action”. The combination of explicit and implicit information is summed up and will give you the lead score. I have seen both “replacement” and “accumulative” scoring adopted. I would recommend accumulative scoring as the whole point of scoring is to monitor activities and grow the score to a qualified score level. Most companies found that implicit data is far superior than explicit data when it comes to scoring. Thus, my recommendation would be that you score regular info like name, phone, address, etc. very low and score clicked in email, visited XY page, etc. higher. It seems to work the best.

When you scoring is up and running and you decided that 75 or a 100 or whatever other number is that needs to be accumulated by a lead to become qualified, you will have to set your system up so these leads would be automatically assigned to sales and alert your sales people of this newly assigned qualified leads.

If you need help with your scoring, assignment rules, or lead process contact us at info@generationOmarketing.com
www.GenerationOmarketing.com