Doing good lead scoring allows us to classify the leads based on their score and thus prioritize the treatment of the leads with the highest score. The criteria for good lead scoring are usually classified into two groups, a group that takes into account the demographic characteristics of the lead and another group of criteria that takes into account the behavior of this lead in relation to the interaction with our digital assets ( website, blog, content, etc.). In this article, I explain these criteria and how to combine them to give an overall score to the lead.
What is Lead Scoring?
You probably already know what lead scoring is, but just in case, I'll briefly explain what it is: lead scoring is a technique that allows assigning a score to a lead depending on some criteria so that if we have 100 leads the system will calculate the score for each of them, with the highest score being the best in terms of the type of lead we want and the lowest score being the worst in terms of the type of lead we want (that is, they will be leads that meet very few or none of the conditions we want). Lead scoring translated into Spanish would be something like the score of contact or prospect.
Why do I have to Lead Scoring?
Another interesting aspect that you may be wondering is why should your company implement a lead scoring system, right? The answer is very simple if your company generates a high volume of leads per month, it is interesting to do lead scoring to be able to classify all the MCA leads and order them from best to worst, in terms of quality. And in this way, it allows you to focus your company's efforts on the highest quality leads, and this refers to both the efforts of the marketing department and the sales department. Being clear, your company is not interested in dedicating efforts to a poor quality lead, to a lead that by analyzing its characteristics you can see that you will not be able to close any sale with it.
Said like this it may sound a bit frivolous but let me remind you of the scenario: your company decides to invest money, effort, and time in capturing leads, in capturing contact details of people potentially capable of buying your services or products. In this sense, you are interested in dedicating efforts to those leads of the highest quality, those who are more predisposed towards the objective pursued by your company.
From how many leads do I have to implement a Lead Scoring system?
This is quite relative, the criteria that you have to apply is the volume of leads that enter per month in relation to the number of people dedicated to the sales process. I'll explain it to you with an example that is surely better understood. Imagine that every month the marketing department gets 100 leads (taking the average it would be between 3 and 4 leads obtained per day). Imagine that the sales team consists of 3 people. In this scenario, as you can see, a lead scoring system would not be much needed. If there is much better, but if it is not implemented it would not be very serious either since with 3 people pending to sell and entering 3-4 leads per day they can look at them with a magnifying glass, they can look for these people on Linkedin, see for which companies they work, what position have, etc. and decide if the sales process is worth the effort.Now imagine that instead of 100 leads per month your company generates 600 leads per month (taking the average, it would be about 20 leads per day). In this case, analyzing the leads one by one to see if it is worth treating them is more complicated. And it gets worse day by day as they accumulate. Think that if a lead is of quality and sales decides to start the process, they will have a treatment time (typically, they will make calls to contact this person, they will try to organize a meeting, they will have to follow up, etc.). Depending on the time that the sales process requires, what will happen is that the waiting list of leads to be dealt with will grow. Imagine that one day the sales team has 80 leads pending to deal with.
Criteria for Lead Scoring
The criteria for lead scoring are usually classified into two broad categories:
Demographic criteria These are all those criteria for assigning points based on attributes or characteristics of the lead, the person in question, and their environment, such as the characteristics of the company they work for.
Criteria according to behavior: these are all those criteria based on the behavior of the lead in relation to interaction with your company, either with the use of your website, blog, downloading content, attending webinars, etc.
Below I explain each of these lead scoring criteria in detail.
1. Demographic criteria for Lead Scoring
The demographic criteria for lead scoring have to do with the characteristics of the lead and his environment, the attributes he has as a professional. Imagine that our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is the CFO of a large company. In this case, we would define criteria so that we would give a lead many points if the position he or she has is a financial director and is also a large company. On the contrary, imagine another person from the same company whose position is "Sales Director", in this case even though this lead is from the same company, this MCA leads would have a lower score because the position of this lead is not the one we want (financial director), but another and therefore we would not assign so many points for this reason (if we decide to assign it).Below I explain several attributes of a lead that are usually considered when making lead scoring:
Position of the person: this is undoubtedly one of the most important attributes to score. Being clear about who is our ideal buyer (buyer persona) we have to give more points to those leads who hold the position we want. It is possible that we have several positions that interest us, some being better than others. In this case, we can apply a range of scores: if you have position A we assign 10 points if you have position B we assign 8 points if you have position C we assign 6 points, etc.
Company name: the company where the person (lead) works is another key aspect for lead scoring. If we sell a Software As A Service (SaaS) that costs € 4,000 per month, we already know that very small company will not be able to afford this software and therefore, even if they want this service a lot, they will not be able to afford it. Now, for the name itself of the company without more, it is difficult to assign points since it is very likely that the name does not tell us anything about the characteristics of the company. To solve this aspect, an external company rating system can be used. Or it can be done manually, by human inspection.
A number of company employees: this is one of the fields that is usually included in the content download form (ebook, webinar, etc.) in order to get an idea of how big the company you work for is this lead and thus be able to automatically assign points. In the previous example, if the company has more than 1,000 employees we would give it many points since it could buy our service, and on the other hand, a company that has between 1 and 10 workers would not give it points, we could even consider giving negative points.
Industry: The industry in which a company operates is usually very important in terms of the sales process. For example, imagine that we know that 40% of our clients are from the "Insurance" industry, 15% are from the banking industry, and so on. In this case, we could define 10 points if the company operates in the insurance industry, 8 points if it operates in the banking industry, etc.
Country: is the country where the lead's company belongs to the sales process important? surely yes. For example, imagine that our company is targeting the northern European market, but has 3 specific countries as a priority. In this case, a scoring scale could be defined according to the country (country A -> 10 points, country B, 8 points, country C -> 6 points…).
These are usually the most common fields that are requested in a form for lead nurturing purposes, and they usually apply to any company. Now, for a specific company, we can think about what additional attributes the lead may have that has a lot of value for us.
For example, imagine that we sell a Software As A Service (SaaS) that serves to perform a complementary function to the accounting software. And imagine that we know that if the company has a financial system like SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, or Sage, the probability that they will buy from us is much higher. And on the other hand, we know that if they don't have any ERP up and running (and they manage the accounting with Excel) it is very unlikely that they will buy from us. Well, in this scenario we could introduce the question in the content download form of the type: What system does your company use? And give as options: SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage, and Excel. And depending on what the user (lead) indicates, we will assign more or fewer points.
2. Behavioral criteria for Lead Scoring
The behavioral criteria for lead scoring have to do with the lead's activity in relation to our company. Without forgetting the final objective that we pursue, which is to sell, a priori we are more interested in a lead that shows a lot of interest in our company than a user who shows practically no interest, right? Well, the criteria for assigning points based on behavior try to reward Live transfer leads who have a "desired" behavior, who show a lot of interest.
For example, imagine that based on the experience we know that the user is much more receptive if we know that they have visited certain key pages of our website, such as the service/product description page, the prices page, and the sales page. request demo. In this case, we could give several points if the above is fulfilled.
Here are some ideas of user behaviors based on which we could assign a scoring criterion :
Key pages that have visited: what we said before, a user who visits the home page and leaves does not have the same value in terms of behavior, as not a user who sees the home page, the service page, the price page, and the contact page (even if you do not fill in the form).
Type of request made by the user: generally the user visits our website and has a "passive" behavior, consults pages, reads articles from our blog, etc. But it takes time to contact or request a demonstration of our product. But there comes a day that the user can carry out any of the actions that we are suggesting, such as requesting a demo or requesting a budget. In these cases, we should give a high score since the user is expressing his interest in our service/product.
Content downloads: we could assign more or fewer points depending on the content that is downloaded, both by the type of content and by the quantity. For example, if the user downloads a guide on a very "top of the funnel" topic, it would have a relatively low value, and on the other hand, if the user downloads a guide like "the definitive guide to select a Software As A Service of what we sell »Then this would have to have much more value because the purchase intention it denotes is much higher.
Frequency of website visits: with this aspect, we could take into account if you are a user who regularly visits our website/blog or not; here the idea would be to give more points to the lead that shows a higher «engagement».
% of interaction with our emails: in a lead nurturing strategy we are going to send several emails to the user based on their interests and other criteria. Well, we may be interested in measuring the user's response to our emails and assigning a score based on their behavior.
Note that all this is an "approximation" to reality, that is, we establish scoring criteria based on behavior that denotes an interest, now this interest is our assumption. Let me explain, we can think that if the user sees certain key pages they have shown some interest and assign them some points, but the reality might not be so, that is, the user would have visited these pages but this does not have to mean that they are interested. That said, statistically, a good definition of criteria and scoring scales should help us build a lead ranking based on their score and ultimately should help us convert more leads into sales.
How to calculate the score of a lead?
Option 1: add points
From my point of view, the definition of the scoring criteria and the number of points that are awarded for meeting a specific criterion is still a convention of each company. Company A can decide that if a lead has a "CFO" position they will assign 5 points and Company B can decide to assign 10 points. The important thing for me is to calibrate the score well for various scenarios in relative terms, that is, in the case of company A if the lead has the desired position (financial director) we assign 5 points and if he has a less desired position ( Sales Director) we only assigned 1 point. And similarly, for company B if the lead has the desired position we assign him 10 points and if he has a less desired position (Sales Director) we only assign him 2 points.
That said, calculating the score for a lead would seem as trivial as adding up all the points derived from evaluating all the conditions the lead meets, right? Well, I have seen this implementation in a company but for me, I do not think it is the most convenient. I explain. I recommend that you do not add the score for the demographic criteria with the score for the behavior criteria. Why? Imagine a lead with a very bad demographic score comes in. This would mean that the lead does not meet the profile of a potential buyer, and therefore very likely it will not be possible to sell anything. Now imagine that this lead shows a lot of interest, and downloads many ebooks, attends various webinars, visits key web pages, etc.
Therefore, the most reasonable option would be to add up all the points that have to do with the demographic criteria. And establishing a minimum from which the lead is considered interesting is considered "qualified" from a marketing point of view. And on the other hand add the score for behavior, and establish the minimum value that we consider that the lead has shown interest or is "hot".
Option 2: assign qualification based on conditions
Of the two blocks of criteria, note that one indicates how good a lead is simply for being who he is, for having the position he has, for working in the company he works, etc. And the other group of criteria indicates how well this lead behaves on our website, according to what it has value for us. In this sense, imagine that you have a very good lead, with very good attributes (position, company size, etc.). Couldn't we classify this lead to 5 levels based on how good it is? This is:
Lead type A -> very well, it meets all the requirements we want.
Type B Lead -> well, it meets many of the conditions but not 100% in some of them. For example, imagine a lead that meets everything but the size of the company. Imagine that we want companies with more than 500 workers and the lead in question works in a company that has 300 workers.
Type C lead -> regular
Type D lead -> low quality
The lead of type E -> qualifies narrowly, but of very low quality.
The lead of type F -> discarded due to poor quality (not meet any conditions)
With this method, the relevant programming could be created to evaluate conditions and, depending on the result, label the lead with a letter "A", "B", "C", or whatever. This makes it more intuitive when dealing with leads, I think, a type "A" lead is the best in terms of quality, and type E represents a person who meets very few of the requirements of our buyer persona.
We should also consider what happens when we do not have all the attributes of this lead in order to evaluate the score. In these cases, we would have to assign a state that indicates "indeterminacy" until we have all the attributes that we need. What is usually done is lead nurturing techniques so that the lead re-downloads other content and in the form you see, new fields are added and fields for which we already have the data are hidden, this is done with a technique called «progressive profiling », but hey, this already escapes from this article (if you are very interested, and your opinion interests me, please just let me know ).
How is lead scoring implemented?
Well, you may have already realized that implementing lead scoring techniques requires first to have very clear ideas, and second, to have some advanced lead management tool. There are dozens of tools for managing leads and the most advanced ones allow lead scoring. Everything that I have explained previously must be programmed in a tool of this type so that it assigns the points as we want. There are some of these tools that assign points by default, be careful with this, because it is the standard criteria of the tool and perhaps for your company it is convenient to apply another.Some of the tools for lead scoring are Hubspot ( www.hubspot.com, one of the best), Marketo (very good, but for very large companies), Active Campaign (similar to Hubspot but with fewer features and cheaper. Explaining these lead management tools would also provide for a new article.
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