Lead Scoring: 3 Steps to a Successful Start

Simply put, lead scoring is a methodology used by marketing and sales to objectively grade leads. If done right, it’s the Holy Grail we strive for as we dream of reaching the mythical pinnacle of lead qualification nirvana, envisioning each lead marketing passes over to sales is from the goose that laid golden eggs. In reality, sales looks at them more like rotten eggs two weeks past their expiration date.

Wait, you mean the contacts who registered for a free iPad aren’t really interested in our product? Why not? Even companies that are leading the way in marketing innovation and sales collaboration deal with this scenario. Lead scoring can bring harmony and sanity to the sales and marketing relationship. Harmony between sales and marketing? Surely I’ve lost my mind. On the contrary. When executed well, lead scoring can help achieve this. According to Aberdeen Research, companies that get lead scoring right have a 192% higher average lead qualification rate than those that do not (source).

This is the first of a series of blog posts that will support you and your organization in implementing lead scoring with success.

First: Dive Into Your Data

Get your hands dirty. Document your buyer’s journey from lead, through lead nurturing, to sales acceptance and opportunity creation, to closed won status. Pick a time frame, examine all the closed won opportunities in that period, and document the profile information (or explicit data) and any marketing activity that you’ve tracked, both at the individual buyer and the company level.

Do certain industries close more often than others? Do you find that manager level titles outperform the C-suite? Are companies with $50-100 million in annual revenue running circles around the Fortune 1000 crowd? These pieces of demographic are critical to deciding who your best targets are. Your sweet spot of past purchasers should indicate what makes up a qualified lead.

Look at how your buyers engaged with your company prior and during the purchase process. What content did they view on your website? How many emails did they click before they submitted a form? How often did they ‘check-in’ before they were passed to sales? Did they download a white paper? Did they attend a webinar? Analyze the activity types, frequency and recency of your buyers’ actions (implicit data) so you can understand what makes your targets tick.

Your lead scoring model should be as unique as your business. Allow data to provide direction, but proceed with caution. California has more closed won opportunities than New Mexico. Is this a coincidence or indicator? Unless your business is geographically based, resist the urge. Leverage internal or external analyst resources to support you in making sound decisions. It will save you a lot of headaches later on. Shout out to Relationship One’s Performance Analytics practice. We have data gurus that help organizations with this exact type of work, including getting access to the data, analyzing it and coming back to you with recommendations to make informed decisions.

Second: Normalize and Standardize

While going through the process of defining the life of a lead to a closed won opportunity, you are going to encounter data that is similar yet too varied to adequately score. In an effort to not miss what could be valuable information about possible leads, it may require that an exercise of data clean up happen in tandem with step one.

For example, companies often capture a person’s title as a free form field. Even if you have processes in place to clean up the title field, you still may have too many values to reliably score on this data. The same goes for common explicit data like department or annual revenue. (Side note: does marketing or sales really need to know a lead’s fiscal 2014 revenue down to the last dollar?)

Take the time to group like-data into larger, yet relevant, buckets. For example, use your title field values to set a job role and/or function. It’s infinitely simpler to score ‘Executive’ than all of the possible C-level values. Not only will this effort help your lead scoring model immensely, but normalizing and categorizing your key data points will also alleviate the time it takes to create lists for campaigns and for seeing key trends in reporting.

Determine if the data you are collecting is able to be scored or could be scored if you did some aggregating. Usually this is on the implicit side when certain activities are challenging to reliably track. My advice: don’t alienate leads, score reliable metrics. In support of that advice, I would highly recommend reviewing the technology you will be using to score. For example, Oracle Eloqua has a Lead Scoring Module which provides a super easy user interface to set up lead scoring. Though, you will want to make sure that the criteria you have selected is available and visible to Eloqua in some way.

Also, take it up as a separate project to review your lead generation tactics and determine if changes are needed to support lead scoring. For example, do your forms need to be updated to add pertinent and/or remove unnecessary fields? Do you need to connect your marketing automation or CRM tool with a data append service? These tasks don’t have to be completed before implementing lead scoring, but they help make your efforts more successful.

Third: Select Criteria By Committee

Good news! You’ve done a lot of the hard (and not so fun) work with steps one and two. Next, find the common themes. Generally speaking, this step is pretty straight-forward, but there is a chance that you could be looking at a lot of options for what criteria could be used to score a lead. Organize a committee of key players from both marketing and sales for the criteria selection process. This way you’ll have buy-in from both parties, which will help with accountability and long-term success.

Consolidate input and document the results. What profile and activity data has your committee determined as critical to score? If you’ve landed on 4-5 criteria to score on both the profile and engagement side, you’re following the best practice. If you’ve found more than that, prioritize and trim down. Starting simple is a solid approach and allows you to more easily optimize, if needed.

So, that’s it! You’re done! Just kidding.

In theory, lead scoring seems simple, but it’s a journey. It can be a lot of fun, but it requires strong collaboration and dedicated team members. We’ve only touched the surface with these three steps. In the next post, we will look at weighting your scores and the many ways to leverage your scoring system.