Lead scoring system is a way to prioritize leads based on the specific criteria that your customers tend to follow throughout their buying journey. By setting up a comprehensive system you can create sales strategies that will nurture leads based on their assigned value/score while allowing your sales team to easily identify those leads who are ready to purchase.
When creating your lead scoring, it is also helpful to understand your current customer base. Look at what processes your sales team is currently using or what steps a customer takes to make a purchase. Next, look at those leads who didn’t make a purchase and understand why they didn’t buy.
Most lead scoring models are based on a 1-100 point value, however every lead scoring model you create should support a key attribute of your core customer.
Various Models Include:
Demographic Information - This can include age, income, gender, geographic location. Any key attribute, should be indicated in your lead form. And remember, you can also include negative scores for those who don’t meet your requirements.
Company Information - For B2B clients, you may want to identify job title, or based on certain company size, etc.
Online Behavior - How a lead interacts with your website will likely reflect the important pages, media, and content they consume. You can sore based on specific pages visited, videos viewed, total pages viewed or how frequently a lead may have returned to your site.
Email Engagement - Just because someone opted in to receive emails from you, doesn’t mean they are going to buy from you. However, if you can score based on those who opens and visits your site from and email has a higher value.
Social Engagement - What effect does engagement in your social post reflect on purchases or lead acquisition. Consider this when establishing your values.
Spam Detection - If you have a number of leads that come in without key data filled in, you may want to give a negative score to these contacts. Or if you are targeting specific companies, you may want to give a negative value to non business email addresses, ie. gmail.com or yahoo.com.
Below are some of the key steps in setting up a lead scoring strategy:
Identify your ideal lead’s key criteria.
Before setting up your scoring system, you must first identify the criteria that represents an ideal lead and incorporate this data into the lead forms that you have created. This could include values such as, company size, job title, or product line interest, etc. In addition to specific data that you want to collect from the lead, you must also identify the ways people can potentially interact or engage with your business. This can included opening an email, visiting a pricing page, reviewing a video, etc.
Target Your Audience
What are the common characteristics that tend to make up your ideal target audience? These factors are not the minimum criteria, but rather common traits that tend to make up your typical customer and their needs. It’s best not to create this in a vacuum. Get input from your sales team as well as marketing to develop a well-rounded view of your customer base.
Review google analytics to see understand the page flow and important content from you customer base.
Establish Criteria Values
Once you have determined what lead criteria is most valuable, you need to assign these factors values. The more important the criteria, the higher the value. For example, if someone visits downloads a whitepaper, you may consider this a higher value than someone who visits your website from an email. Or maybe you consider number of pageviews, or specific page visits, such as your pricing page. Assigning points makes more sense when you think in terms of the ideal buyer you identified.
Detailed Point System
Establish separate classifications, which you can think of as the most important “must-haves,” from qualifications and prioritization. By delineating them, you can qualify the differences between the categories and their meaning, even if the values are the same.
Classification = 100 points: This is the base buyer persona score which you will build upon to determine how sales-worthy a lead is.
Qualification = 10 points: Each sales-qualified trigger is worth 100 points; these customer behaviors are added to the classification score.
Prioritization = 1-9 points: Assign a single or double-digit point value to different priority triggers based on importance. The last two digits indicate level of priority.
Determine the Sales Threshold
At some point, you should be able to identify when a lead is sales ready. This is when you can have your sales team contact the lead, present the purchase offer, etc. Remember that your buyers journey and don’t try to close your lead too early. By setting up an accurate lead scoring system you can best reflect the path of the sales funnel and engage at the key purchase times.
The Final Score
Remember that your lead scoring will require adjustments and tweaks when you first roll it out and begin to see the reality of how leads move through the process. Use this as initial evaluation as an opportunity to assess how effective the system is at determining high-quality leads and refine it to better target this group.
Look at leads with the highest score, compare their similarities and differences as well as their buyer journeys. See what worked and what didn’t and adjust the lead score threshold as needed. Once you begin using the scoring system, you will be able to see what must be refined.
