Lead Scoring Basics with Tips - #DigitalMarketing

Among many challenges marketers face are: Generating Leads, Converting those Leads into a paying Customer and finally Nurturing those Customers to grow with you.

Taking a step back before we jump into the topic, a ‘Lead’ here is referred as a prospective client (who after conversion would pay for your services) as well as a prospective candidate (who after conversion/joining your team will work with you to deliver those services in your organization’s unique style). You see, your business can't exist without any one of them missing from the picture. If you don’t have the right team in place, you might as well stop looking for new clients. Hence, generating or converting leads, is about both #servicesmarketing where you attract new clients as well as #employerbranding aka #talentbranding where you attract fresh talent into your system. (More about Talent Branding in my previous articles - Rethinking Employer Branding, A Strong EVP Impacts the Bottom Line, Who's handling your Employer Brand). So, do read rest of the article about lead scoring from the view of both as a service provider as well as an employer.

Coming back to the challenges marketers face:

• Generating Leads – is where marketing concepts like Audience Persona creation, Target Segmentation, Content Creation per Media Plan, Campaign Execution, Analytics and Measurement come into the play.
• Converting Leads – is where Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) techniques come into play through lead nurturing tactics.
• Nurturing Customers – is where concepts like nurturing current partnerships to grow together and #AccountBasedMarketing can be employed.

Right in between Lead Generation and Conversion comes #LeadScoring. Here are some basics, tricks/tips you need to know about implementing a #leadscoring practice, managing your lead funnel, and how it’d all contribute to the bottom-line justifying #MarketingRoI. We will go with the usual route starting with WHY, then HOW and WHAT.

WHY: The Lead Scoring is Essential?

Your marketing investment, if put in action rightly, will start generating leads from each channel which can overwhelm the sales, as no sales team has time to pursue every lead equally. That’s where the concepts like #MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) and #SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) come in. Simply put – Prioritize better leads, produce better sales/conversions.

Lead scoring allows you to make the most out of every lead (prospective client/candidate) that enters your sales CRM or Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Properly prioritizing and tracking each one to see more and more turn into actual customers/employee, is what Lead Scoring is all about.

TIP#1 - Lead scoring is not always about generating qualified (sales ready leads). Implementing a lead scoring program, also enables you to determine a prospect’s current level of interest in your business and use that information to drive sharper, more relevant campaigns that could

1. have your brand connect with the prospect with respect and
2. get into a long-term business with you.

HOW: Leads are scored?

The most critical aspect before we get into how the lead scoring is done, is to make sure sales and marketing are on the same page about how the leads are defined along with all the aspects of lead scoring attributes. Leads are scored based on the interest they show in your business, their current place in the buying cycle, and their overall company fit. All you need to do is keep an eye on moving a prospect forward the first time they raise their hand to speed up the sales cycle. Lead Scoring is organizing the segmentation by ranking the prospects under different buckets based on the demographics, behavior, actions and relationships along with the time frame of the engagement to categorize leads as active or passive. For example:

WHAT - to do?

TIP#1 - Different marketers do lead scoring differently. You can either get your demographic and behavioral scoring run separately and combine later or create total scoring with all attributes considered at one go. You need to play around with different combinations to give high or low score to a lead. For example, active prospects who are decision makers and/or influencers from the right size of the company in terms of employee strength and revenue having relevant tech stack expertise in your location would be scored higher.

TIP#2 - Critical thing to keep in mind is to make sure the demographic scoring doesn’t make up no more than half of the total score. Simply because a lead that does not have any behavior, active or passive, may not be ready for sales interaction.

TIP#3 – Employ PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) methodology to keep optimizing your lead scoring models for:

• the threshold point system based on their sales readiness and where you handover a lead to sales
• low scoring leads to put them in the nurture bucket

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Hope this helps to get to basics. Would love to hear if you’ve used any advanced metrics into your lead scoring model to deliver personalized Account Based Experience #ABX in your #ABM Strategy.