What is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring is the process of assigning values, often in the form of numerical "points," to each lead you generate for the business. You can score your leads 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 can help your team “triage” leads. Giving the most time and resources to those who are most likely to buy, but still giving the right amount of marketing attention to those who are less likely to buy straight away.
The best way to create a lead scoring system is using data from previous campaigns.
The first step before creating a lead scoring system is looking at data from previous campaigns and determining what traits did successful customers have? For instance, perhaps they were in need of a specific aspect of your product or service, and that’s what drove them to buy.
The Type of Data You’re Going to Need to Gather
Lead scoring allows sales and marketing teams to separate a lead’s interest in the products and their intention to buy. A lead may be interested in a product, but have little or no intention to buy. The goal in this case would be to put focus and resources into the lead who has intention to buy, but still using appropriate resources to engage the interests of the other leads. In order to do this, data from previous campaigns is necessary. We need to determine: what is it that made people purchase the product or service?
There are different ways to score leads such as their actions, their demographics, company information/demographics (if you’re a B2B company), or online engagement.
In order to determine which information you should gather, you will need to talk to both your sales team and your customers. Create a survey for both your sales team and customers to fill out. Get to the bottom of why your customers decided to buy. Then, determine what they all had in common.
Running an attribution report is also a great way to come up with a lead scoring system. If a large number of your customers engaged with a certain piece of marketing content before buying, it is a good indication that they were convinced by that piece of content.
Here are some examples of the type of data you should gather:
- Demographics: What is the age, income, nationality, location,etc. Most of your customers will at least have one trait in common, determining what that is can be a powerful tool when you’re ready to set up a lead scoring system.
- Conversions on LP: What landing pages did customers get to before they converted. This will also turn up in your attribution report.
- Look at engagement: How often are leads opening emails, engaging with social media posts before they convert? Determining if high engagement is a sign of a lead ready to buy, can even help you to automate your marketing pipeline.
What Are The Types of Lead Scores:
Fit: Fit is a lead scoring type that is based on whether or not the leads’ personality, interests, and lifestyle match up with the product or service. For instance, a company that’s B2B will think that a person with a specific job title will have the best fit as a lead and future customer.
Interest: How interested a lead is in your product or service. This can be gauged by how much they are interacting with your marketing and sales materials. For digital marketing, this can be easily judged.
Personas: Buyer personas are a great way to segment your marketing. They are also useful for lead scoring. If you segment your customers into buyer personas, you will notice certain personas are more likely to convert. This can also help you to score leads.
Know How to Prioritize Data
Emphasizing from before, having an understanding of how important certain traits are will vastly improve your lead scoring system. Use spam detection in order to negatively score possible leads that could potentially be spam. (You can use captcha software to prevent spam and detect potentially false leads).
You will need to determine attributes that have led to higher quality leads. Talking to the marketing and sales team will help with this. Understand that trial and error may be an inevitable part of the process.
