Lead scoring is most useful when the quality of leads is more important than you than the quantity of leads.
What I mean by that is: if you don’t have many leads to begin with, it probably doesn’t make much sense to filter them through scoring. Sales will want to talk to all of them.
Unhappy Sales Team?
It’s when the Sales team is unhappy with the quality of the leads coming in when you should start looking at lead scoring. “We’re wasting too much time talking to the wrong people” is a common complaint you’ll hear.
Lead scoring can be tricky
Now, it’s tricky to get lead scoring right without a lot of trial and error. The reason for this is that every case is different – like so many things in marketing, there’s principles and then there’s application.
in order to implement lead scoring successfully, you need to have a pretty solid idea of what your Customer Journey looks like. Particularly the parts of it that actually contribute to generating a good lead.
Lead scoring requires you to attribute value to a couple of things:
- Activity. Also known as implicit actions, i.e. things your prospects do that are more or less subconscious choices. This includes visiting web pages, for example.
- Engagement. Explicit actions. Clear choices your prospects make, such as opening emails, clicking on links, downloading whitepapers, watching videos. Stuff that shows real intent.
- Fit. Whether the lead is a even good fit for your business.
A useful exercise is to sit down and create a list of items for each of these three categories. Then, allocate a score (plus or minus!) for each individual action, engagement or fit item.
If you don’t have experience with lead scoring, this can feel pretty arbitrary. That’s okay: you’ve got to start somewhere.
But those of you that already have experience with lead scoring will have some idea of the scores you need to attribute to some of the actions and prospect attributes in your Customer Journey.
The best way about it is to just set it up and check incoming scores frequently.Make sure you meet with sales on a regular basis to discuss lead quality. If you’re using lead scoring to determine when a lead should be pushed to sales, this is critical.
Don’t try to get this right in one go: implement, experiment, adjust.
