The Beginner's Guide to Lead Scoring

Did you know 71% of sales leads are lost because of poor follow-up practices? Companies don’t respond fast enough to leads! Believe it or not, lead scoring might offer a solution for those very struggles.

With lead scoring, you don’t waste loads of time on unworthy prospects, and you don’t ignore people on the edge of buying. But what exactly is lead scoring and why is it so important for your business? And how do you do it?

What is lead scoring?

Lead scoring is a shared sales and marketing methodology for ranking leads in order to determine their sales-readiness. You score leads based on the interest they show in your business, their current place in the buying cycle and their fit in regards to your business.

Lead scoring is the process of assigning values, numerical "points," to each lead generated by your business. Leads are scored based on multiple attributes, including the professional information they've submitted to you and how they've engaged with your website and brand across the internet. This process helps sales and marketing teams prioritize leads, respond to them appropriately, and increase the rate at which those leads become customers.

Lead scoring is not:

• A stand-alone marketing process because sales’ input is essential to identify a “qualified” lead
• Cherry-picking hot leads while ignoring the rest of the database

How to Use Data to Calculate a Lead Score: 

Scope understanding and data analysis –

a.      Understanding client requirement for lead scoring – what they are looking for, current challenges and needs, calculating current lead to customer close ratio.

b.      Align with Sales team to define the ideal buyer persona with explicit scoring parameters: Defining the ideal customer and non-customer – Based on discussion with Sales team, we need to define a customer and non-customer for the brand – Build scoring criteria, rank by critical, important, influential, or negative–

1. Geography
2. Job Titles/ role –

• Defining decision maker titles
• Influencer titles
• End-user titles
• Negative titles

1. Industry/ vertical
2. Job title/Role
3. Company size
4. Annual revenue
5. Number of Employees
6. Age (B2C)
7. Gender (B2C)
8. Education Level (B2C)

c.      Align with Sales team to define a sales ready-lead with Implicit scoring parameter: Defining the behavior and activity of a customer or a non-customer - Build scoring criteria, rank by critical, important, influential, or negative

1. # of pageviews
2. # of downloads
3. Type of content consumed
4. Type of pages viewed
5. Recency of activity
6. Interest in events/ webinars
7. Search on your site
8. Visiting a landing page
9. Attending a webinar
10. Watching a video (and how long they watch it)
11. Clicking on links
12. First touch
13. Last touch

d.      Collecting data for lead scoring from different sources –

1. Lead forms (created on Marketing Automation software or third party forms)
2. Data append
3. Marketing software
4. CRM

e.      Model configuration: Building a scoring model based on inputs collected in steps b and c:

1. Establish scoring methodology (points, grades, etc.) and building a model for positive and negative scoring:
2. Determine a score threshold that will indicate a sales-ready lead (e.g. 75 or higher)
3. Verify the accuracy of model based on the output generated.

f.      Solution Deployment: Production ready solution is deployed along with the handover activities and contracted period of support.

g.      Lead Score Analytics:

1. Create triggers for sales-ready leads to send these to the assigned owners.
2. Create weekly/ monthly lead scoring reports

Some Interesting reads…

An interesting article on the science behind lead scoring to show how lead scoring works, best practices for lead scoring, ways in which predictive lead scoring differs from traditional lead scoring.