Lead Scoring: Set Up Complete. Now What?

Thanks for sticking around for part two of our series on Lead Scoring. Part one is by far the hardest part. You’ve defined your criteria and you’ve configured a Lead Score Model inside of your Oracle Eloqua instance. If you haven’t done the configuration part yet, and are unsure how to do that, let us know! We can point you in the right direction for self-service, or one of our certified consultants can support you to ensure it’s done correctly.

The next phase is super exciting, says me, a self-proclaimed (and proud of it) marketing geek. You’ve put your lead scoring system in place, it’s up and running, looks cool and shiny, but now what? It’s time to use the information to strengthen your database and create killer content, strategic campaigns, and much more.

Define Stages & Assign Scores

Hopefully by now you’ve wrapped your mind around the concept that dumping all leads on sales’ desk and saying “Go at it!” is not the best tactic. Marketing should generate and distribute content and campaigns with the objective of handing a lead to sales at the exact right moment in the buying process. Defining stages based on your Lead Scores helps marketing and sales to determine when leads are ready for sales consumption. A sample recommendation would be:

Unranked: Have completed no activity or there is minimal profile data to provide a score. Inquiry: They’ve raised their hand by showing some interest, or you know some profile
 information. Their score is low due to a combination of lack of important activity and potentially not being the target audience.

Suspect: Suspects are the middle ground between Inquiry and Marketing Qualified Lead. They are intriguing given how close they are to being ready for sales. They have probably completed some higher valued activities and are closer to the target you are trying to reach.

Marketing Qualified Lead: Red rover, red rover, send that lead over! These are ready to go over to sales. They’ve completed activities identified as strong interest and they have met certain profile requirements, placing them at the front of the line.

Once Stages are defined, assign Lead Score values. For example:

Unranked: D4
Inquiry: D2, D3, C3, C4, B4,
Suspect: D1, C1, C2, B3, A3, A4
Marketing Qualified: B1, B2, A1, A2

Now that you have completed this task, there are many ways you can use your Lead Scores and Stages to optimize your marketing efforts.

Solidify Segments

Your Lead Scores can give you a sense of the profile (or explicit) data that is missing from your database. After deciding what explicit fields you want to score on, design campaigns and develop ways to fill in as much of that data as possible. Update your forms and use progressive profiling, data appending solutions, and contact washing machines to populate the data you’ve defined as valuable. Doing this will rev up your Lead Scoring engine, as well as, increase the size and accuracy of your lists.

Customize Campaigns

Segmenting or defining a targeted list based on certain criteria isn’t a new thing, but now you can add a valued layer by including where the lead is in the buying cycle. For example, let’s say a CIO in the medical industry would be considered a prime lead for your organization. You can build a list using this profile information as your criteria. Check out the Lead Scores for this group of individuals in your database. This will give you a sense of how your target audience breaks down with respect to their stage in the buying cycle. The Lead Scores you are seeing should drive what types of campaigns, content and messaging you are running against this audience.

For example, consider planting dynamic content on specific areas of your website to allow known visitors to have an experience that addresses the questions they are asking at that point in their solution research. A suspect might see a series of case studies or a video explaining the ROI of your product while an Unranked visitor would get the simple overview educating them on what the product is. When you think about it, the possibilities range far and wide. Don’t forget to test!

Compete Better

These days, it’s known that most buyers don’t ‘raise their hand’ for more information until they’ve done their research independently, including looking at your competition — such savvy shoppers. If they come to you after that, your marketing team did a solid job retaining that lead. Congrats!

But, what about the prospective buyers you never hear from? Lead Scoring provides much more of an edge to jump to the front of the line and catch a prospect before they go too deep into looking at other options. Sales has the opportunity to frame their dialogue and influence the prospects’ thought process. Even if they check out your competition, you’ve got Lead Scoring on your side to give your organization an opportunity to close a sale you would never have known existed.

It’s All About Sales

Let’s be honest. In the end, sales is what matters. Lead Scoring is going to be evaluated on how well sales is doing. Sure, qualified leads are great, but if sales are few and far between, there’s a problem.

Set up a regular cadence to communicate with sales and report on how many Inquiries and Suspects there are in your database and how quickly they are moving up to the Marketing Qualified level. This keeps marketing accountable and gives sales the information they need to plan out their efforts for MQLs. Keeping sales in the loop regarding the metrics that make up your Lead Score system is critical to helping them to set their priorities and win more deals.

As mentioned before, Lead Scoring should be a living, breathing thing. In the next chapter of our Lead Scoring series, we will discuss ways to do a temperature check on your Lead Scoring system to determine that it’s working and ways to optimize it.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with these wise words: The marketing world is your oyster. If you have seafood allergies, then the world is your burrito.