Lead scoring is readily available in most marketing automation platforms but quite often is misused, overlooked or poorly planned.You should score leads by lead stage to help sales team prioritize time.
Lead scoring is most effective when your MAP allows you to configure a “lead qualification setting” which sets a minimum thresholds for scores across the different score types, e.g. Contact (who they are) and Activity (what they’ve done). By creating a minimum threshold in multiple score types, requiring certain scoring criteria to be met (e.g. has a certain word in their Title) and minimum aggregate values in each of the scoring categories, you will have a better expectation for a prospect’s quality.
This improved prospect intelligence further helps sales prioritize and stay focused on the best prospects in your database.
Marketing and Sales should collaborate on the following:
Defining Lead Stages. Commonly these are Prospect, MQL, SAL, SQL, Closed, but depending on your process, this could vary. Here’s an example from my “Lead Stage Management Primer” of a variance with unique stages from prospect to customer.
Lead Stages:
- Prospect – All records in the database
- Lead – Identifiable (min. First name and Email) & shows interest in our material/product.
- Qualified Lead – Either 1) Sales has conversation with 2) requested demo 3) awareness that is shopping for solution
- Imminent Opportunity – Demo or qualification call completed. Follow-up actions from Lead is required.
- Opportunity – completed follow-up actions (e.g. needs assessment worksheet or requirements document)
- Proposal – Proposal received
- Closed Won – became a client
You can use lead activity with lead scoring and lead stage management to monitor progress through these stages.
Here is a lead scoring example:
A Prospect completes a form becomes a Lead (Score: 10. Change lead stage to “Lead”. Activity Score: 10).The lead opens and clicks on the autoresponder after the form submission (Engagement Score: 2 x 5) The form included the Job Title field and the lead’s submission had “Marketing” in the field. (Contact Score: 25) The Lead visits 4 more pages (Activity Score: 5 per page = 20). The Lead Stage “Lead” has a minimum Contact threshold of 25, a minimum Activity threshold of 30, and a minimum Engagement threshold of 10.
The Lead Qualification Settings for “Lead” are as follows:
A Contact’s total Lead Score must be at least 50 points.
A Contact must have achieved the following minimums per category:
This new Lead would meet the lead qualification settings and is deemed “qualified” for this stage. Now, go through that similar exercise for each lead stage you’ve defined. I like to keep my total stage count to 5-7 because it gives me enough intel as to what stage someone is in without it being overwhelming to manage.
At a minimum, go through an exercise with key members of Marketing and Sales to identify:
- Lead Stages you want to track
- The contact data/fields you need to collect at each stage
- Activities that verify membership in each lead stage
- Contact data that verifies membership in each lead stage
- Respective scoring values of completion of identified activities
- Respective scoring values upon collection of each piece of contact data
This could take weeks to complete. It will likely naturally evolve into the creation of buyer personas which is a valuable result that makes you even more successful with marketing automation.
I hope this lead scoring example gives you a place to begin your lead scoring plan – let us know if you have any questions. Until we meet again…
