Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a method of rating leads to help you better understand how much benefit they can bring your business and how to treat them. This technique allows marketing and sales teams to analyze and divide leads into groups based on their buyer journey stage, engagement, behavior, etc.

In this video, Alex explores 4 effective strategies to streamline lead scoring, helping you optimize your sales process and boost conversion rates. 

In this article, we’ll review the benefits of lead scoring and unveil how it works. We’ll also provide lead scoring models, a guide on building a lead scoring plan, and some effective best practices.

Why should you implement lead scoring?

Lead scoring can help you understand how to work with different parts of your audience. By analyzing user data and assigning a score, you can determine which leads are most likely to become customers and which ones need nurturing from your business. At every stage of the buyer’s journey, prospects require different treatment. If you learn to assign the correct score to them, it will make your sales and marketing teams work more efficiently.

Lead scoring also helps you save time and money by tailoring the most relevant content and offers to specific segments of your audience. This, in turn, can improve your relationships with the audience.

Lastly, lead scoring helps you sort out the least active part of your audience, the cold leads, which allows you to send them more personalized messages. If you understand the behavior, needs, and challenges of these people and provide them with tailored content, you can interest them.

Now that you know why lead scoring is important for every business, it’s time to proceed to the next section to reveal the benefits you can reap after its successful implementation.

Lead Scoring Benefits

There are numerous reasons for you to implement scoring, and we’ll cover the main ones.

• Better forecasting. With an effective lead-scoring strategy, you’ll have a clear understanding of your sales pipeline. This way, marketers understand where each lead is in the sales process. As a result, businesses make approximate calculations regarding their revenue. Besides, marketers can analyze the performance of their lead generation and lead nurturing processes by paying attention to prospects with high scores and conversions.
• The aligned work of sales and marketing teams. A proper lead-scoring strategy requires finding a common definition of a qualified lead. It’s represented as a score. The higher the score, the higher the likelihood of conversion. By making your sales and marketing teams aware of the high-priority leads, they can focus on potential customers likely to convert, provide them with personalized campaigns, and interact with these leads effectively, encouraging them to convert. It drives collaboration between teams striving to find relevant strategies and bring leads toward the desired action.
• Focus on high-quality leads. After identifying high-priority prospects who are likely to complete a purchase soon, you’ll be able to allocate resources to the right audience segments. This process lets you focus on leads with the potential to convert while minimizing efforts and time spent on prospects who show little or no interest in your product. However, you can continue nurturing them with relevant content and products.
• Improved lead nurturing. With effective lead scoring, you can group prospects with the same score and share content that resonates with their stage of the customer journey. It allows you to use personalized content and nurture prospects more effectively. As a result, you can increase your conversion rates while improving customer satisfaction.
• Shorter sales cycle. When you focus your time and resources on prospects who are ready to purchase, you can move these leads down the sales funnel faster. If your sales reps manage to address all the concerns and answer all questions of qualified leads promptly, you can encourage them to make decisions quickly.
• Better ROI. Prioritizing prospects with high scores enables you to improve your conversion rates. When leads are ready to buy from you, your sales agents only need to provide the right answers to questions, encouraging you to take the desired action right away. As a result, you’ll have a better return on your investment after you improve conversions.
• Higher efficiency and productivity. By focusing on the right leads, your marketing and sales team can direct all their efforts to people ready to buy. It helps them reduce the time they spend on leads who aren’t going to convert. This results in better productivity and higher efficiency of your business. Your sales reps will have higher close rates, and you’ll have better profitability.
• More targeted marketing campaigns. While keeping in mind lead scores, marketers can develop more personalized and effective strategies to drive conversions. When they are aware of the prospects’ customer journey stage, they can use relevant and timely messaging. For instance, when prospects are in the consideration stage, marketers can send case studies or testimonial videos, invite these people to webinars and podcasts, or share original reports and research.
• Improved customer experience. By providing personalized content that resonates with prospects’ needs and following up with them all the time, you ensure a better experience for each of your leads. When you deliver relevant content prospects search for, you can show potential customers that you care about their preferences and challenges. It helps you enhance not only customer experience but also boost customer satisfaction, encouraging repeat purchases.

Now that you know the pros of lead scoring, it’s time to find out how it works and allows companies to focus on high-priority prospects for better conversion rates.

How does lead scoring work?

In this section, we’ll reveal how lead scoring works. It will help you understand how to start the process and do it successfully for your business.

Lead scoring starts with assigning scores to prospects based on specific criteria that show how likely they are to convert into clients. There are different criteria marketers take into account when providing each lead with these numerical values, including information about prospects’ job titles and industries, website visits, email engagement, forms filled, content downloads, and many more. Businesses give a score to each interaction, while the highest scores go to the actions that demonstrate a robust purchasing intent. For instance, if potential customers explore product pricing, request accurate calculations, and ask for a demo, they get high scores for these types of engagement.

After potential customers reach a specific score, they are considered qualified and are ready to be handled by the sales representatives. Sales teams prepare a strategy for interactions and focus their efforts on converting these prospects into customers. They use personalized approaches and follow up with leads using email marketing, chatbots, SMS, and other channels that help effectively drive purchases.

Now that you know how lead scoring works, it’s time to explore its key models.

Lead Scoring Models

Besides understanding how lead scoring works, you should also take a look at the models you can incorporate into your lead scoring strategy. We’ll unveil them below, but first, let’s define the term “lead scoring model.”

The lead scoring model is a framework marketers use to assess and rank potential customers based on their likelihood of converting into customers. It helps companies focus on the leads demonstrating high buyer intent, craft relevant marketing strategies, and effectively allocate resources to the right people. Below, we’ll review the most popular lead scoring models you can use for your business.

Behavioral scoring model

The behavioral model implies assigning scores based on prospects’ actions and interactions with a brand. It focuses on leads’ behavior to find out whether they have the intent to buy. Marketers can figure it out by evaluating website visits, specific page views, content downloads, resource views, email opens and clicks, event participation, and social media engagement. The model suits businesses perfectly with a blog, active social media presence, and other online content.

Explicit scoring model

An explicit model focuses on the information leads provide when they interact with a business, including form submissions, contact data when they download materials, and information they provide when registering for events. The examples include job title, industry, company size, geographic location, etc. This is one of the easiest ways to assess prospects because you can instantly determine whether these leads match your ideal customer profile.

Implicit scoring model

An implicit scoring model involves evaluating behaviors observed by the system, like website interactions, email engagement, and social media activity. Together with explicit scoring, this model allows businesses to have a clear understanding of prospective customers.

Negative scoring model

A negative scoring model focuses on specific actions prospects perform that indicate the absence of intent to convert. When businesses identify these interactions, they remove points. These actions include unsubscribing from your newsletter, visiting your career page, job title (student or retired), competitor that looks for information, etc.

Demographic scoring model

This model relies on demographic data. With a demographic scoring model, leads are assigned scores based on their job title or role, company size, industry, or geographic location. It’s perfect for B2B companies looking for the right business clients who are likely to convert.

Now that you know some of the most popular models, it’s time to unveil how to build one for your business.

How to build a lead scoring model?

Creating a lead scoring model involves going through several essential steps. We’ll uncover them below.

1. Encourage collaboration between teams. You should work with your sales and marketing teams to decide what a marketing-qualified lead and a sales-qualified lead look like. Choose lead criteria and outline the lead scoring process each team agrees with. You should also discuss the goals of implementing a lead-scoring model. Examples include boosting conversion rates by 20%, improving lead quality, optimizing collaboration between departments, etc.
2. Decide on lead scoring criteria. Think of the criteria that will help you identify high-quality leads. Depending on the data you want to rely on, you can focus on more narrow concepts. If you focus on behavioral data, including site visits, content downloads, webinar attendance, or social media engagement, you should assign scores based on prospects’ intent. Consider assigning leads a higher score when they demonstrate an intent to buy from you.
3. Assign points to each criterion. The next step involves assigning point values to prospects based on their alignment with your ideal customer profile and their likelihood of converting into customers. For instance, if leads request a demo of your product, assign these prospects 40 points. Ensure that you have the right differentiation between leads who show real intent to purchase and those who aren’t likely to convert.
4. Identify scoring thresholds. You should identify a specific score that allows prospects to be considered as marketing-qualified leads or sales-qualified leads. This score will help your teams decide what to do next and what content to share.
5. Test the model. Try your lead scoring model for a short period to evaluate its performance and effectiveness with your prospects. You should pay attention to the leads with high scores to see whether they convert into customers as expected. Leads with low scores demonstrate that these people aren’t likely to convert. Gather feedback from your teams to figure out whether the model is relevant for your target audience, goals, and teams.

Now that you know the most crucial lead scoring models, it’s time to reveal how to build a lead scoring plan. It’s a very important part of every successful lead-scoring process.

Developing a lead scoring plan requires accurate structure, which allows you to properly prioritize prospective customers based on the likelihood of conversion. Below, you’ll find a step-by-step guide on doing it right. So, let’s dive in.

Step 1. Identify Your Problem

The first step implies figuring out the main challenge you want to solve when implementing lead scoring. Below, you can find some of the most common problems businesses face:

• a volume issue when you need to drive more qualified leads to your sales team;
• a quality issue when your sales team wastes time on leads who are not yet ready to purchase;
• a long sales cycle that needs to be shortened.

It’s always necessary to identify the main problem because it will serve as the foundation of your lead-scoring strategy. Depending on the problem, you’ll need to adjust your strategy, collaboration between teams, and lead scoring model.

Step 2: Design a Scoring Model

Identifying a problem will help you design the lead scoring model to achieve your business objectives. It’s also necessary to align sales and marketing objectives to identify which demographics and behavioral patterns are worth tracking and assign a score to each.

For example, subscribers who clicked through your last email campaign may earn 10 points, while those who only opened the email receive 5 points. Users visiting your pricing page might gain 15 points, whereas a visit to your brand’s homepage could add 7 points to their score.

You should also prioritize prospects based on the channels they use for communication. For instance, people who subscribe to your email newsletter should get more points than those who just clicked your PPC.

It’s also important to care about score decay. This means that you should remove points from leads who have changed their intentions or stopped engaging with your content.

Step 3: Set Thresholds for Your Lead Scoring Model

You should decide upon the score ranges that will coincide with the leads’ readiness to buy. For instance:

• A lead with a score of 0-20 can be considered a cold lead or even a non-fit, which allows you to remove them from your program;
• A lead with a score of 21-49 can be classified as a warm lead, who isn’t ready to buy and needs to move along in your nurturing program;
• A lead with a score of 50 and above is a hot lead, so it’s best to hand this contact over to the sales team.

Step 4: Choose a Lead Scoring Service

Select a service that will meet your functionality requirements and budget. You can overview some lead-scoring companies. If you run a small business and only work with a few digital marketing channels, you may not need to have a universal service to cope with a lead-scoring task.

Step 5: Decide How to Engage with Leads After They Reach Thresholds

Think about the ways to deal with leads when the lead scoring system identifies their readiness for shopping. It’s best to automate communication to put your business in front of your leads with the most relevant content when they are most likely to engage with you.

For example, you can send automated emails with exclusive offers and discounts to close deals with hot leads and emails with more product information to warm leads who need nurturing.

Besides knowing how to build a lead scoring plan, you’ll need some practical tips to attain the necessary business goals.

11 Best Practices to Succeed at Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a time-consuming process that requires structured planning and execution. We’ve compiled a list of tips to enrich your lead-scoring strategy.

1. Align sales and marketing efforts. Consider organizing meetings of sales and marketing teams to outline a clear understanding of a marketing-qualified lead and sales-qualified lead. Consistent communication between the teams will help you revise lead scoring criteria and process itself, talk about the quality of prospects, and make sure that all the teams strive to attain the same goals.
2. Ensure clear and relevant scoring criteria. Before leveraging lead scoring, it’s essential to pay attention to demographic factors and behavioral data to establish a powerful lead scoring model. You should keep these criteria in mind when assigning scores to every interaction prospects perform. It will help you identify and evaluate each engagement with your brand and prioritize prospects with strong buyer intent.
3. Review your lead scoring system. Your target audience can evolve over time, with new behaviors and shifting demographics as your market share grows. Lead scoring isn’t a one-time setup. Review and adjust your scoring tactics at least quarterly to stay aligned with any changes.
4. Use negative scoring. This is necessary for keeping the score relevant to users’ behavior and engagement with your brand. Negative scoring will help you send the right types of content at the right time, especially when leads have lost interest in your brand.
5. Disqualify dead-end leads. To save time and effort, focus on leads who are genuinely interested in your brand. Your lead scoring system will help you identify their status and enable you to take action.
6. Set up different lead scoring models. It's perfectly fine to use multiple criteria for lead scoring simultaneously. The number of models you implement should align with the diversity of your demographics. For example, you can rank users based on their activity, the number of purchases made, or the total amount spent in your shop.
7. Notify your sales team about new MQLs. It’s best to immediately inform your sales department about new hot leads coming. Automated notifications will do just that, avoiding human error and any delays. This will make your business more likely to keep the leads in your funnel.
8. Use historical data. With historical data, you’ll be able to identify interactions that indicate that prospects have a robust purchasing intent. You can analyze your previous conversions and the actions that led to them. Review and revise your lead scoring model. Some adjustments will help you act upon actual lead conversion information.
9. Group prospects based on scores. After assigning scores to leads, divide them into groups using these scores. You can create several audience segments named cold, warm, or hot prospects. Consider delivering leads content based on the group they belong to. For instance, prospects with high scores might need to be contacted by sales reps, while leads with low scores might need some more effort from your company.
10. Prioritize high intent signals. After identifying your most engaged prospects, concentrate your efforts on them. High-intent behaviors, such as requesting a demo, exploring pricing, or joining a webinar, indicate a strong likelihood of conversion. Additionally, focus on the frequency and recency of interactions. Tracking how recently prospects have engaged with your brand and how often they do so will help you gauge their interest in your product.
11. Use CRM and marketing automation. Consider leveraging marketing automation and CRM to run your lead scoring on autopilot and allow you to improve productivity. Services like SendPulse provide you with all the necessary tools to assign scores to prospects and identify high-priority potential customers likely to convert. With the platform, you’ll be able to use real-time data and interactions for successful lead scoring. Additionally, a CRM system is essential for tracking all interactions and consolidating information in one place.

To summarize, lead scoring is the basis of successful marketing efforts. With its help, business owners can identify leads likely to convert in a structured plan rather than rely solely on their gut feeling. It helps them allocate the budget correctly, save resources, and effectively act toward conversions.

Last Updated: 15.10.2024