Lead scoring is a method of ranking your prospects based on their likelihood to buy from you. It helps you prioritize your marketing and sales efforts, optimize your resources, and increase your conversion rates. But what if the market conditions change? How can you adapt your lead scoring model to reflect the new realities and challenges?
Your lead scoring model is not a static tool. It should evolve with your business goals, your customer behavior, and your competitive environment. If you don't update your model regularly, you risk losing relevance, accuracy, and effectiveness. You may miss out on valuable opportunities, waste time and money on unqualified leads, or damage your reputation with poor outreach.
25% of the marketing budget is wasted on misaligned models. Take control of your sales success by designing your model like a road map, with new roads representing customer trends, competitors as detours, and even beautiful routes representing emerging opportunities.
You need to be more aware when NOT to adjust your scoring model in my opinion. Often there is pressure from a team with a target (e.g. marketing with a MQL target, sales having a slow month etc.) and there isn’t actually anything wrong with the scoring model. What you end up doing is changing the model to accommodate a subset of stakeholders at the expense of the rest of the company. In the Marketing missing MQL targets example you will likely be wasting sales’s time on under qualified leads making them less efficient. Scoring models should be flexible and regularly refined but be wary of the “why” behind any changes you make.
Adjusting Lead Scoring for Market Conditions: Regularly review and update scoring criteria to reflect current market trends. Incorporate customer feedback and behavior changes into the scoring model. Test and validate adjustments to ensure accuracy.
Before you make any changes to your lead scoring model, you need to measure how well it is working. You can use various metrics and indicators to evaluate your model performance, such as lead quality, conversion, velocity, and feedback. Lead quality measures how many leads are meeting your qualification criteria and moving to the next stage of the funnel. Lead conversion indicates how many leads are becoming customers and generating revenue for your business. Lead velocity shows how fast leads are progressing through the funnel and reaching the decision point. Lastly, lead feedback assesses how satisfied your sales and marketing teams are with the quality and quantity of leads they receive.
Once you have a clear picture of your lead scoring model performance, you can start looking into the various factors that could be influencing it. These factors can range from customer preferences to market trends, and will differ depending on your industry, market, and product. For example, customer preferences may have changed over time, as have their online and offline actions. Additionally, the market conditions, demand, and competition may also have shifted. Finally, your business objectives, strategies, and tactics are also important to consider when evaluating your lead scoring model.
After identifying the factors that affect your lead scoring model, you can make the necessary adjustments. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but you should review your lead scoring criteria to ensure they are still relevant and accurate. Additionally, you should update the weights to reflect the importance and impact of each criterion. Testing your lead scoring model is also important to ensure you are getting the expected results and feedback. Finally, you should monitor and optimize your lead scoring model by tracking and analyzing its performance and outcomes to improve it further.
In a down market, the bar is lowered significantly as to what constitutes a “lead”; whether this is a page view,, click or even an email open. This is an alternative to only qualifying those that fill out a form on your website.
Marketing analytics is a powerful tool that can help you adjust your lead scoring model for changing market conditions. It can collect, analyze, and visualize data from various sources, such as your website, email, social media, and CRM. This will enable you to understand your customers better, identify patterns and trends, and make data-driven decisions. You can use marketing analytics to segment your leads based on their characteristics, behavior, and preferences. It can also help you score your leads based on their actions, interactions, and engagement. Additionally, it can predict your leads' propensity to buy, churn, or upsell. Finally, you can use marketing analytics to personalize your marketing and sales messages and offers as well as automate your lead nurturing and follow-up processes.