Lead scoring is considered to be one of the most essential parts of everyday duties of marketing department and sales team as it helps to prioritize and qualify the best leads for sales. The fundamental aim of this methodology is to measure the value of each lead and determine how the nurturing process should flow.
Moreover, it increases the effective cooperation of both marketing and sales departments. Nevertheless, lots of companies still don’t know how successfully plan and implement an effective lead scoring.
Therefore, we are going to look at different practices for lead scoring model and discuss how to develop each step of a powerful scheme.
First thing first, while developing such model, one should understand the difference between next two elements: Explicit scoring is based on the information given by the client such as the size of the company, how they are segmented, revenue range, location, etc.; whereas, Implicit scoring is based on tracking the client’s digital interaction with your company, that is why they are interested in your product or service, where they like to interact (web, social, email), etc. Web analytics is an effective and powerful way to track leads’ interests by seeing what pages they are visiting in your websites, what particular emails they open, whether they respond to them. Thus, by combining these two scorings you will be able to create a powerful lead scoring model which consists of 4 main blocks:
- Define your criteria. The basic point in creating a scoring system is identifying an ideal customer profile (ICP) as it is the best way to ensure that you are focusing on high-quality leads (check out our article “Guide to Sales Qualification” for more details). For this, you need to gather the information through activities like:
- Website data (number and kinds of visited pages, amount of time spent on pages);
- Email engagement ( number of opened emails);
- Event and webinars attendance;
- Product demo views.
- Structure a model and rank criteria. After getting all the information you needed, the next step is to rank points according to level of criteria importance. The aim of allocating scores is to identify the top performing areas and create a hierarchy for point system. For example, do you want to give a higher score to the leads visiting your pricing page rather than to leads visiting any other page? Once you decide in which priority will be your rankings, try to choose simple yet robust lead scoring system. It is very important to create a chart to outline every action or piece of data that you take into consideration and put the corresponding score.
- Be flexible with rankings. Always be aware of any changes of data and information. Therefore, constantly review information and have a continuous process of tracking the lead score structure based on the results. Apart from this don’t forget to evaluate this model in collaboration with other teams to make it more productive and rewarding.
Lead scoring is considered to be one of the most powerful marketing tools. An effective lead scoring system can help marketing department to generate better leads and sales team to convert more leads by concentrating their efforts on high-quality prospects. However, the successful lead scoring strategy isn’t so easy to implement. It takes lots of time, efforts, and trials. Therefore, invest time in creating and perfecting your lead scoring model so that you will be able to focus your time exactly on what matters most.