Nearly all organizations depend on sales efforts to grow their business. With so many leads and contacts bouncing around in your CRM, how do you know which ones to pursue and which ones to nurture? In other words: how do you know which contact is most likely to take your (business) relationship to the next level?
Lead scoring is a highly effective method to track a lead’s progress through your sales funnel; we recommend it as part of an essential account based marketing strategy. Let’s review the basics of lead scoring as well as how it can benefit your company.
Lead Scoring Defined
As we mentioned above, lead scoring is a simple yet effective way to see how and how often prospects are interacting with your company. When a prospect engages with your brand, depending on the action, they receive a certain number of points. These points accumulate over time and move the prospect through the different lead stages of your sales funnel. So, the more points a lead accrues, the more likely they are to do business with you!
Lead scoring also helps you determine whether the prospect is a subscriber, marketing qualified lead (MQL), or sales qualified lead (SQL). The stages are defined as such with examples below:
- SQLs are ready for a sales follow up after they have been vetted from several marketing interactions, leading to a high accumulation of points (25+ points).
- MQLs are ready for marketing material based on their demographics and moderate to high brand interaction (8-24 points).
- Subscribers have subscribed to a few content offerings, such as your blog or newsletter, that your company has provided (5 points).
These designations help you identify how you to need further interact with the prospect as well as their chances of signing a contract with your company.
Example Lead Scoring Model
There are many different ways to set up a lead scoring method that are dependent on your company specifics. During the process of creating a method, we consider the following questions:
- How is a “lead” defined at each stage?
- What actions correlate to which lead stages?
- What sequence of actions advance the overall lead score?
- At what score threshold should MQLs be handed off to sales?
Below is an example of this one way to do action-based lead scoring.
Action | Value |
Opens Email | +1 |
Clicks Through Email | +1 |
Visits Page on Website (Per Page Visited) | +2 |
Reads Content Piece | +3 |
Reads Whitepaper/Case Study | +5 |
Registers for Webinar | +8 |
Attends Webinar | +13 |
Submits Form | +21 |
These numbers can (and should) be adjusted based on how your prospects actually interact with your brand. We tend to use the fibonacci sequence when it comes to lead scoring.
Testing the Model’s Effectiveness
After you’ve implemented your ideal lead scoring model, it’s essential to test its effectiveness to ensure that it’s measuring lead scores in a way that benefits your company. We suggest waiting one or two months after the implementation to measure results and make any subsequent adjustments.
During this process, you’ll want to evaluate the scoring threshold for subscribers, MQLs, and SQLs. Look into several example contacts to see if the lead score and status matches where you think the contact should be in the sales funnel; this exercise will help you decide if or when adjustments need to be made.
If adjustments are made, you’ll want to reevaluate your lead scoring model in another month or two. This will help you score your leads as accurately as possible.
Final Thoughts
Lead scoring is not for everyone. For example, if you have a limited number of customers in your market universe, you’re only working a few opportunities at any given time, so you already know which prospects to focus on. Lead scoring is best for companies that are managing thousands of opportunities and need help identifying which ones sales should know about.
In the end, there’s no one right way to do lead scoring–it’s all about what’s best for your company based on the actions that your prospects take. If you find that leads are more likely to buy from you after a webinar, include that in the model! Lead scoring exists to make it easier for you to track a lead’s progress through the sales funnel so you have a better handle on how well your account based marketing efforts are paying off.
For more information on action-based lead scoring, reach out to us today!
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