Marketing Automation is not cheap. There, I said it! But when used to its full potential, an advanced Marketing Automation system can help increase the number and quality of leads as well as establish nice clean business processes. But in order to get your full money’s worth, you need to have the fundamentals set up properly, which include: Lead Scoring, Lead Lifecycle, Channels/Programs, Lead Nurture and Analytics. To help you move your company into the green, we have put together a list of expert lead scoring tips.
What is lead scoring? Lead scoring is a way to qualify leads for sales based on their actions (e.g. filling out a form) and demographics (e.g. job title, company size etc.). Lead scoring utilizes a point system to tell when leads are ready for sales and makes sure your sales team is getting highly qualified leads.
Lead Scoring
- Talk to Sales
This is one of the most important steps, but often the step left out. Marketing gets in such a frenzy to build and conquer that we forget to include the members of our team that knows the most about our customers–sales.Your sales team has been around the sales block and knows a thing or two when it comes to who your customers are. In fact, I bet they have an order of which leads they contact first based off the subtle qualifications and patterns only understood after closing multiple deals.The first thing you should do when setting up your lead scoring is sit down with your sales team and ask them who their ideal customer is. We need to know who they are AND what they do that shows they are a qualified candidate. Then we can take this information, and build out our profile for Marketing Qualified Leads. - Map Out the Lay of the Land
Pull customer data out of your CRM and Marketo and see what patterns and qualifications customers share. What is their job title and industry? How many employees do they have? Is there a specific asset they all downloaded? Recording this data can help you determine which attributes and behaviors lead to success. If you see some patterns, you can take this data and decide what actions or demographics deserve higher point values in your scoring. - Determine Instant Qualifiers
If someone fills out the “contact us” form, does it typically lead to a sale? If so, your lead scoring can reflect this and give this particular form extra points to push the lead into the sale que. Typical instant qualifiers are filling out the “contact us” or “demo” forms, engaging with sales at an event, etc. - Negative Leads
Are there any signs that a lead is not ready to talk to sales such as unsubscribing from emails, invalid first name or visiting the careers section of your website? Take inventory of all of the attributes and behaviors that say someone is not as likely to interact with sales and decrease their lead score. NOTE: It is important to be careful with your lead decay as many clients have come to find, if left unmonitored you can end up with a lot of leads with negatives scores. - How to Score?
After you have fully prepared a list of everything you would like to score, you must determine values. We recommend setting this up in a spreadsheet like the one below to help you decide on values depending on how important each attribute is.NOTE: These tables are an example of different demographic and behavior values to score, the attributes and the point values will vary for different businesses.Demographic
Attribute Value Score Company Size >500 15 (200-500) 10 <200 5 Job Title C-Level 15 Manager, Director 10 Admin 5 Industry Finance and Insurance 15 Healthcare 10 Retail 5 Negative Invalid Email -10 Invalid First Name -10 Invalid Last Name -10 Behavior
Attribute Value Score Email Opens Marketing Email 3 Clicks Link in Marketing Email 5 Opens Sales Email 3 Clicks Link in Sales Email 6 Event Registered 5 Attended Webinar 15 Attended Event 20 Visited Booth 25 Web Fills Out Any Form 15 Fills Out High Value Form 75 Visits Any Web Page 5 Visits Multiple Pages in 1 Day 10 Visits High Value Web Page 10 Negative Visits Negative Webpage -10 No Activity -10 Unsubscribes -10 - Build Scoring the Easy Way
This final tip will be extremely useful … Marketo has already done the work building out a great lead scoring program for you. Rather than spending hours on this (literally, it takes a long time to build out a lead scoring program), import the Lead Scoring program from the Marketo Program Library and make the small adjustments needed to personalize it. To import a program from the Program Library, Go to: Marketing Activities→ Select New→ Import Program→ and then choose the program you wish to import.
Remember, lead scoring is an invaluable tool for qualifying leads, but your first version shouldn’t be your last. You should be checking in with your sales team regularly to make sure they are receiving enough leads AND that these leads are actually qualified. You will probably have to update your lead scoring a few times to get it just right.
