Example Lead Scoring Programs

Mary,

Global scoring is my advice. Have an operational program house all scoring campaigns and have the program's tokens house the score values. This allows both, the convenience of one place to make all scoring changes and one view to determine values relative to others.

Mary - So one of the things I've found helpful is trying to translate the point system into something that sales can understand and give feedback on, since you will need feedback from them. Here is a sample of one of the parts of the scoring I built and share with sales, I can send you the whole thing through DM. The "interest level" is how I get feedback from sales.

The best advice I have is to look at your closed/won leads and go backwards. They often end up on similar pathways over a large enough sample size and then make your lead scoring model represent that. If you look at 1000 closed/won and 90% downloaded 3 pieces of content or clicked 3 email links etc. You can then compare it to closed/lost and see if perhaps they only looked at 1 piece of content or 1 clicked link and devalue what got that person to sales before they were ready and value the added touch points in a more significant way.

Hi Mary,

Another thing you can do as we just adjusted our lead scoring is talking to your inside sales rep or whoever follows up once the lead hits the threshold. We did this and found that our scoring program was pushing a lot of bad data to our inside sales rep and he was getting a little frustrated. We found, for example, we were scoring too high on webinar registrations and attendances because after they opened all the emails associated with the webinars, attended, and opened up the follow up email - they were almost to the threshold. Attending one webinar doesnt mean a lead is ready to be called. This way, we kind of worked backwards to see where the tendencies lie and then made scoring adjustments off of that. I have a bi-weekly call with our inside sales rep to see the quality of leads coming into his queue and it seems to be getting a lot better.

Hi Mary,

You have to avoid these Mistakes while Setup Lead Scoring Program.

• Not talking to your sales reps: For an effective lead scoring system, marketing and sales teams need to establish an objective definition of a converting lead. Including sales feedback in your lead scoring process helps in making adjustments on lead acquisition and scoring. These feedback discussions should not be limited to sales managers and directors, but should equally involve sales reps from different segments and geographies.
  Quick Fix: Be proactive. Don’t let the wrong lead drain the time of your sales team. Schedule a monthly discussion with some of your sales reps, and update your scoring parameters whenever required.

• Using the same scoring for different lead sources: You get leads from different sources like web forms, email marketing, social media, direct marketing, referrals and many more. Every lead source has a different level of engagement, interest and cannot be ranked the same. The idea of ranking different lead sources is to identify the top performing areas and create a hierarchy for your scoring.
  Quick Fix: Segment your lead sources, and for each of them, assign different scores for web activity. For e.g., a lead coming from PPC and viewing demo should get more score, than a lead coming from 3rd party content syndication viewing the same demo.

• Generating behavioural indicators for overly simplistic actions: Prospect interaction matters in lead scoring but there are instances when some should receive higher scores than others. For example, one of the most effective ways to measure lead activity is email open rates. A lead who opened an email and a lead who downloaded your asset should not be given the same scores.
  Quick Fix: Segment behavioural interactions for your leads. Identify which lead activities to create more impact on lead conversion, and which don’t.

• Not using Score Decay: Many marketers don’t use a minimal level of lead score decay. If your leads haven’t had any activity for a certain period of time, say three months or more, then you might want to assign negative scores to them. Also, when you increase the score for a lead for some specific behaviour (downloading case study, attending the webinar), that score shouldn’t last forever. If degradation of score value is not used over time, it can result in score inflation.
  Quick Fix: Assign “expiration dates” to all positive lead scores. Expiration dates can be a viable option because positive behaviour is only truly relevant in the short term. A lead that was very active 5 months ago, for example, isn’t very interested in a sales rep today.

• Considering Demographic and behaviour score separately: Demographic scores help you measure how well your leads are qualified to enter sales funnel, and behavioural score measures their level of sales-readiness. However, many marketers just focus on behaviour scores while pushing leads as MQL to the sales team. For e.g., if Andrew comes on your website, views demo, and downloads a white paper, even though his title is Intern, if you do not score titles he may still get passed as a lead to your sales team.
  Quick Fix: There are two ways to fix this. In your marketing program, you can mark leads as MQL only when they meet a minimum threshold for both demographic and behavioural score. Else, you can add your demographic score and behaviour score to get an aggregate lead score, which can be used as an MQL threshold.

• Ignoring Lead Disposition: Sales Reps mark leads under multiple dispositions. It may come as a surprise to many when they see the number of leads getting marked as bad Leads. In most cases, these bad leads are with names like John Doe, Mickey Mouse etc. All these leads should be prevented from getting scored and going to the sales team in the first place.
  Quick Fix: Create detailed dispositions in Salesforce or your CRM for bad data like bad name, bad company name, bad email ID etc. Regularly check the leads getting marked under these dispositions. Based on the finding, update the filters in your demographic scoring campaigns.

• Focusing only on hot leads: Lead scoring isn’t the only factor to identify hot leads. There might be leads which have a high lead score, only because they hold a relevant position in a billion-dollar company. So, you need to enable your sales team to look at both, the qualification of a lead, and their interest level. Many times, leads with high lead score may convert less than the leads with an average score.
  Quick Fix: Setup Sales Insights for your Marketo Account, based on both demographics and behaviour score. You can use stars for demographic scoring, and flames for behaviour scoring. This way the sales team can focus on quality leads in a better way.

Thanks

Akshay