5 Best Practices to Set Up a Winning Lead-Scoring Model
And help your sales team improve conversions and increase your company's pipeline
Generating leads is great, but not all leads are equal. As a savvy and busy marketer, you’ll want to ensure your time is well spent by identifying and nurturing the leads most likely to end with a conversion or sale.
What is Lead Scoring & Why is it Necessary?
Establishing a winning lead-scoring model will help you prioritize the most qualified leads with the highest probability of closing and nurture them accordingly. To determine a lead’s score, you’ll start by creating a value for demographic, firmographic, and behavioral attributes. With this points-based system, leads are qualified based on an agreed-upon set of criteria, identifying which leads sales staff should call on in the short term and which leads should continue to be nurtured through the marketing funnel.
Simply put, by establishing a lead-scoring model, your company can:
- Easily identify potential customers
- Rank leads by their level of interest
- Better understand your leads’/customers’ buying or decision-making journey
- Improve your content based on conversions
Setting Up the Right Lead Score for Your Company
Establish goals and alignment with sales and marketing. As marketers, we often focus on generating leads, handing them off to sales, and forgetting about them. But by following up with our sales team and asking which leads ended up buying, we can learn a lot about the right target demographics, their current challenges/questions/interests, patterns, and how to score our models appropriately. So even when creating a lead-scoring model from scratch, it’s best to talk to your sales team to understand their process, how they determine the level of interest, what they are seeing and hearing in the wild, and which types of companies they think are the best targets. This will help set the initial lead score model and key performance indicators to determine how many leads are expected to filter through to them.
Define your target audience.
Your product/service/company isn’t a great fit for everyone. Therefore, set up your lead score model to elevate the leads that fit your ideal customer profile. This should include explicit data points, such as industry, location/region, titles, revenue, etc. Work with your sales team to determine the demographic and firmographic data associated with your ICP and then assign point values based on the level of importance of each attribute.
Identify desirable behaviors.
Once you know who you’re targeting, you must identify the touchpoints they can take throughout your marketing/sales funnel. This includes visiting web pages, filling out forms, downloading content, sharing content, opening emails, clicking through emails – you get it. Next, score these behaviors based on their value – for instance, filling out a form shows a lot of interest and should be worth a high score, while just opening a marketing email is a passive action and should get a very low score.
Identify negative/undesirable behaviors/demographics.
Identifying contacts that don’t meet your ICP or desired audience is just as important as identifying high-potential leads. This is where negative scoring comes into play. It quickly weeds out those individuals who are not the right fit for your company. It also helps keep partners, employees, competitors, or unwanted entities out of your marketing funnel. Add negative scores to competitors’ domain names, regions outside your selling/service area, wrong titles, visits to your career page, etc.
Monitor and adjust your lead-scoring model periodically.
Lead scoring is not a set-it-and-forget-it type of methodology. Instead, it needs to be monitored, nurtured, and adjusted. Ensure you continually monitor your lead scoring to ensure it is performing well and leading to conversions. The leads you give to sales are only as good as your marketing funnel and scoring model, so if they aren’t converting, the problem may be in how you are marketing to them, who you are marketing to, or the scoring model itself.
Increase ROI with a Well-Built Lead-Scoring Model
Establishing a winning lead-scoring model can make a significant difference in the success of your marketing and sales efforts. By prioritizing high-potential leads, your sales team can focus their efforts on those most likely to purchase, increasing your company’s pipeline and improving conversions.
However, it’s important to remember that lead-scoring models require ongoing monitoring and adjustments to continue performing well. By following the best practices outlined in this blog, you can set up a lead-scoring model that helps your company identify potential customers, better understand their buying journey, and improve your marketing efforts to increase revenue.
Need help creating a lead-scoring model to help evaluate your leads in real time? Check out our Lead Scoring template to get started – or give us a call. We’re here to answer questions or set it up for you.
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