Lead scoring best practices: what are your 3 tips for successful lead scoring?

I agree with Justin, when he says that quantifying buyer behavior is one of the greatest contributions that the marketing automation platforms have given us, it definitely helps both marketing and sales to sort out their priorities and be more productive.

My Lead Scoring tips would be -

1. For a Lead Scoring system to work effectively, it is essential to define a good Lead and one that is agreed and understood both by marketing and sales. This definition then becomes the base for any further measurements. What is to be noted is that arriving at a common lead definition that works for your company is a process of trial and error, you start with a broader definition and depending on the Lead responses, and analyzing how they behaved in the past will help you arrive at a more workable definition.

2. Enterprise buying is a group decision and hence when scoring you should consider the cumulative score for all activities performed by different visitors from an enterprise. Most B2b purchase decisions are group decisions and different people in the group play different roles - there are the researchers, the influencers and the final decision makers. Taking an overview of the activities of an enterprise not only give a fair idea of how serious the lead is but also where in the decision making process they are.

Currently the most common method of qualifying a lead is – to score leads on lead attributes (industry, title, etc), purchase intent (budget, timeline, authority), and level of interest in your company and offering (website visits, whitepapers downloaded, search terms).
As Shreesha Ramdas COO, LeadFormix puts it -
'While this qualification works great for finding good leads who can be nurtured into prospects and then converted to a sale – such scoring fails to capture the ‘Hot leads’ – those who are ready to buy and should be called by the sales teams with a pitch immediately.
This is because, lead attributes only provide info on whether a visitor is a possible prospect; Purchase intent – only provides information on whether your solution fits his budgets and is relevant to the visitor; The last level of scoring is based on the activities a person performs on the site – like the frequency of his visits or content downloads.
In clear terms as per the current scoring techniques – only if a Lead fills an inquiry form on the site will he be even considered as a ‘hot lead’ to be pursued directly by the sales team.”

3. So probably the only way you can also find 'Hot Leads'(sale-ready) using the lead scoring system is by adding another dimension to your scoring system, that of finding the possible 'intent' of the visitor.

This important dimension captures a snapshot of the frame of mind demonstrated by the visitor in the present visit. A collection of the data of multiple visits clubbed with the activity done over that period and the intent captured for each visit gives insight into the thought process of the visitor over a period of time. This in turn helps determine in an educated manner a Qualified Hot Lead.

Hope that helps,

Cheers
Merlin

I think my peers have hit on a lot of good points here, so I'll offer three overlooked points that marketers need to consider when implementing lead scoring:

1) LEAD SCORING SHOULD BE INDEPENDENT OF A LEAD NURTURING PROCESS. For effective scoring, leads need to be scored by an engine separate from a lead nurturing engine. Let's look at a scenario. If a lead is in a process and there's logic in the process that says if a lead downloads a white paper, give it 10 points. The lead then moves to the next stage of the process. What if a lead, independent of a process (or at the end of a process) actually downloads the white paper - would you want them to receive 10 points? Of course you would. Make sure your leads are scored by an independent engine, then no matter where a lead is at in a process, it will receive the credit (and attention) it deserves.

2) LEAD SCORING COMPONENTS NEED TO BE VIEWABLE INDIVIDUALLY AND IN AGGREGATE - As mentioned in previous posts, lead scores have various components. Typically a) Demographic (how well a lead fits with a target market), b) behavior (what have they done to become a qualified lead), and c) depreciation (decrease in the behavior component over time as a lead gets stale). THESE VALUES NEED TO VIEWABLE INDIVIDUALLY AND IN AGGREGATE IN YOUR CRM. Without this, your sales team has no relational value. Is a lead score high because it's a high demographic/low behavior or visa versa? For example, if a lead is 100 points (total)...is it 100 demographic points or 50/50? If you show the components, your sales team can quickly identify how and why a lead scores well - or not so well. One score shows nothing.

3) USE MULTIPLE SCORING MODELS. Unless you're a one-product company, you need to be setting up a lead scoring model for each product in your portfolio. If you have 3 different products targeting different verticals, you need to have a model for each vertical. Why? Each product has a different demographic and behavior component. If you try to roll all these components into one score, your model will be totally ineffective.

More on Manticore Technology's take on lead scoring here: http://www.manticoretechnology.com/blog/index.php/use-3-components-to-create-...

Christopher Doran
Manticore Technology
@cdoran

Craig,

Great question! Thanks for the opportunity to participate.

While you did not specifically mention marketing automation, I think it safe to say that lead scoring works best with a strong marketing automation package. If you meant to imply marketing automation as a basis for lead scoring than I missed the boat with using my first suggestion for a best practice:

(1) Correctly implement a marketing automation solution

Of course lead scoring with a marketing automation solution works best when those highly scored leads are immediately delivered to the sales team – which implies that the marketing automation system is integrated to the customer relationship management (CRM) solution. While it is not absolutely necessary that this be so, I will submit a second best practice:

(2) Implement lead scoring with a marketing automation solution that is integrated with a customer relationship management system.

Once the foundation for the operational process is in place, the variations for establishing the score itself are really wide open. I believe that most marketers focus on (a) demographics and (b) digital activity.

Of course, selling 101, the basic demographic scores should align with the ideal prospective buyer target for the company doing the selling. I have found that some companies have not created an ideal buyer profile (other than a profile of “If they have budget they are ideal!”). So, is identifying your best prospects by demographics a lead scoring best practice? Definitely – but you asked for three and I would hate to use my last submission on such a basic selling concept.

The fun stuff, the concepts that get sales and marketing excited, are those that provide real insight into buyer behavior: the measuring of digital behavior. Marketers and sales people alike look into the lead scoring “crystal ball” of digital footprints to discern, “When are they ready to buy?”

That in itself is a significant challenge. You may think scoring a key web page visit or the download of a specific asset higher than a simple visit to the about us page is the holy grail of classifying a lead as sales ready – and you would be among the leading demand generation teams using marketing (automation).

The problem with that is, “How did you determine that the page or asset deserved a higher score?”

You can see that I am leaning toward “map your key pages/assets score to the buying process” as my third submission.

Is this too basic a submission? Perhaps this is another Marketing 101 concept?

I suspect so, but I will say this: If your sales and marketing teams got together to map the buying process, then related pages and assets to that map, you may be at the head of the class but you don’t get extra credit.

You missed one key input: verifying the buying process with the buyer! If you didn’t include input from the buyer than you mapped a selling process with some best guesses as to buyer inclination. So there is my third best practice submission:

(3) Interview buyers – start with your customers and prospects – to clearly identify the buying process. Then accurately map your key pages and assets to the buying process – and assign them appropriate scoring values.

If I may supplement your request for three with a fourth, I would say that lead scoring is not a once time exercise. It is a continuous improvement process that requires regular monitoring and adjusting to maintain relevance to shifting buyer behavior and newly developed marketing strategies.

Those may or may not have been what you’re looking for but they are foundational in successfully leveraging lead scoring in our technological day and age. I thought that might be a good start.

Craig, this is a great topic and I suspect that you will get many best practices. I can’t wait to see them, learn from them, and improve our own methods for lead scoring.

Thanks again for the opportunity to contribute.

Good Luck and Great Selling!

Scott

Many good answers here. From our perspective, the three most important considerations on Lead Scoring are:
a. Make sure sales and marketing executives are aligned to the quality lead definition, and have both departments agree to the scoring model. We use a range of 1-100. Both departments need to agree on the grading system regarding
* Implicit factors- prospect behavior (pages visited, downloads, links clicked)
* Explicit factors- Title, industry, buying timeline, etc.
It's important to really understand the prospect's pain points within the purchase funnel, so that relevant content can be distributed to those audiences.
b. From the outset, have both departments agree to the threshold on when the prospects are ready to be synced to CRM and ready to be contacted by sales. This will take some flexibility and needs to be tested. Remember, the goal is to communicate to sales-ready leads, and testing scoring models will contribute to that goal.
c. Continue to test. Not just the scoring models, but also content strategy, drip campaign strategy, and landing page strategy. Analyse results. Continue to communicate and adjust accordingly.
Paul Mosenson
NuSpark Marketing

I am going to focus my "best practices" on the tactical elements of building your first scoring model. Too often, companies approach the design of the first model in guessing mode. This does not need to be the case. With some fore-thought, a good scoring model can be well balanced and contain actionable insights into your prospects and leads. Lets get started:

1) Stakeholders - Collect all stakeholders and identify the areas that should be scored. Include demographic (company size), behavior (registered for a paper), and qualification (self identified as being a decision maker) criteria. This becomes the master list of criteria to potentially be scored during this initial model.

2) Heuristic Analysis (score the score) - Harness the collective knowledge of the stakeholder group to identify which criteria should be scored and how they should be weighted. Each member ranks (scale 1-5) the importance to lead quality of each criteria. Collect the results and consolidate into one working document and drop the lowest scoring criteria. We usually try to drop the bottom third to half for the initial lead scoring model. There are two primary benefits of this approach. First, you remove bias from the system as all stakeholders are given an equal. Second, now you have guidance on how heavily or lightly to weight the various criteria based on the team score.

2) Scenarios - Identify at least three scenarios based on how a lead would interact with various marketing programs and properties. Once numbers have been applied to the list of scoring criteria link the scenarios to the scores and review. This can be done with the stakeholder group or a subset. Use a gut check. If a lead took the various actions and scored out of the program would this be a good lead for sales? If yes, you are in good shape. If no, an adjustment to the criteria score or the overall send to sales threshold is necessary.

Now you have a scoring model that is ready for programming into your marketing automation system. While there is nothing better than live data, this method does offer a place to start based on the best knowledge in your organization.

Mac McConnell
BlueBird Strategies, Inc.
www.bluebirdstrat.com

I love the notion of quantifying buyer interest with lead score. It's probably the single greatest contribution the marketing automation craze has given us. Our three simple tips are:

1. Use a SEVERAL lead scoring models based on buyer behavior and learned paths. When we start assembling lead scoring methodologies for our clients or tweaking our own over time we look at the clients BEST buyers and produce buyer personas from that data. Once you have these assembled its the goal to fit movements into those personas. How does that persona buy? Then associate scored movements to that profile. (i.e. a VP of ops in charge of streamlining the customer service process may attend a webinar on CS software, consume some online content and then task an ops director with further research. We want to score that handoff highly as we know buyers in the past that have progressed through a similar process). Another type of buyer may take a very different approach so it's important to score those paths differently. If we had used the same scoring methodology for the example above we might have thought the VP was uninterested after he (himself) stopped moving on our site.

2. Consider that lead score works both ways. Negative lead score can be a powerful tool that ensures that sales time is spent wisely and that buyers end up in the proper nurturing buckets if their movements slow down or taper off.

3. Use qualifying movements. This one came out of an example where we had a client who really valued web movements because they had a freemium offering. One of their leads actually qualified 100% off of online page views. On their model that's 100 page views and never more than 5 points per day. That's a LONG lead qualify that is NOT a qualified lead. We put in place a qualifying movement that no more than 75% of score could come from web activity and also stipulated that a lead MUST fill out at least one of their interesting forms before they can reach a HOT status. It's worked out very well for them and I later stole the idea for our own lead score model.

I think one of the interesting things about our company is that we get to run Marketing Automation systems for very different clients and I can honestly say no two are alike. We are seeing that type of exposure allow us to think about lead score in a much more dynamic manner. So... I guess tip #4 here is very similar to Debbie's - keep your scoring model fresh and make sure you're looking at the results in relation to your original buyer personas. After all those are the targets we're aiming for!

CRAIG - GET FOCUS TO ADD FILE SHARING (attach a file) TO THESE COMMENT THREADS. I THINK IT WOULD BE AWESOME TO BE ABLE TO ATTACH SCREENSHOTS OF WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.

Great question.

"Lead scoring" in my view is a tactical tool for pipeline engineering and there is much to be done to provide a proper framework, beginning with mapping your Marketing and Sales Funnel.

1. Today’s marketing and sales funnel (including lead scoring tactics) must be developed and managed by understanding both the sales process and by considering the way buyers move through the purchase process. It is vital for B2B Marketers to document the customer buy cycle including the critical parties involved, process and length of buy cycle. In other words don't be tempted to make the audience conform to a lead scoring schema. Adapt your schema to a well researched and understood buy cycle. Understanding the customer buy cycle is an important step in optimizing Funnelnomics—enabling Marketers to deliver targeted communications that move leads from one stage to the next in the funnel in the most cost-effective way possible. (According to industry analysts at SiriusDecisions, only 1% of B2B Marketers consider the customer buy-cycle when it comes to planning and executing marketing and communications programs.)

2. It is also really important to fully map the customer Decision Making Unit (DMU) including the title and role of each person in the decision-making process. Marketers also must understand the type of information they need (based on their individual pain points) and how they would like to receive it (i.e. direct mail, email, etc.) in order to move the decision maker to the next level of the funnel.

3. Once the customer buy cycle has been mapped, it is time to map the sales cycle. Product Marketing, Customer Service, Sales organizations, and Marketers together should:

•profile customers and define top customer characteristics
•define target audience characteristics including demographics (revenue, employees, industry) and psychographics (persona types, likes, dislikes)
•define the sales cycle including phases and parties involved
•benchmark conversion rates to move to the next phase
•define decision drivers and triggers including customer needs, events, etc.
•secure agreement on qualification criteria for lead scoring
•gauge Sales and Inside Sales capacity for engaging with qualified buyers

This must be done in order to monitor and manage prospects as they move through the funnel based on "scores" to optimize marketing programs for continuous improvement. Otherwise, it's the old "garbage in garbage out" result.

Lead scoring is a significant component of establishing a closed-loop demand generation process. The 3 areas that help optimize the lead scoring and qualification process involve two definitional exercises before you implement and one after:

1. Create a profile of your IDEAL client. This typically involves several meetings with the sales team to define the attributes and criteria that will determine what is a "sales-ready" lead. The ideal profile will include such things as
Company size (revenue, and employees)
industry (major and sub-segments)
Key titles and functional areas
Corporate culture and values
Defined buyer initiatives
The marketing contact data base should include fields that can capture these and other relevant data elements

2. Determine what "Buying Behavior" constitutes actively evaluating vs. passive interest and activities (the stages of buyer interest to decision). We should be able to get this from doing win reports and from our sales team meetings above. Assuming that the attributes defined in 1 above are correct, the scoring values assigned here will have the most impact on whether a lead should be routed to sales for immediate follow up with the prospect. Typical behaviors include, content downloads, event (live/virtual), web browsing, community involvement, etc.

Once we have these definitions in place, as others have indicated, keep the scoring process simple at first. Fully expect that the definitions and rules for hand-off from marketing to sales will evolve over time as we see what works and what does not.

Most important is the 3rd tip:
3. Make sure to define the steps involved in returning leads to marketing that turn out to NOT be "sales-ready". This is often overlooked in the development of a solid closed-loop demand generation process. What do you do when sales does accept that marketing qualified lead? How do you classify the lead now? Is it dead? Does it require furthering nurturing? In my experience most of these situations of returning to marketing is because the lead was pre-maturely forwarded to sales.

With all three tips mentioned here, the key is clearly defined rules and qualification criteria that sales agrees to upfront.

Henry Bruce
The Rock Annand Group
@hebruce

Lots of fantastic answers here by some smart people. I feel like the guy who showed up late to the party, only to find that the great guacamole dip was already gone!

I wrote about this topic a few years ago on my blog (yes, it was written in black and white, before color blogging became so trendy) in answer to a lot of client questions about how to get started with Lead Scoring. If you'd like to read the whole thing, you can see it here: http://theinnovativemarketer.blogs.com/ideas/2007/11/while-checking.html

If I had to pick the top three recommendations I have now, after working with a whole bunch of clients who got it right (and wrong the first time), I'd say the following.

First, figure out what data is most important for your sales team to know in order to engage with a prospective client. For some organizations, the most important thing is an identified need for the product. For others, the lead has to fit a specific demographic profile. Still others require merely a faint pulse in the veins of the prospect in order to engage. The point is, by identifying what makes a lead more sales-ready, you'll create better efficient on the part of the sales team, which will result in sales happiness and patience while you work out the system over time.

Second, flip the telescope and think about lead scoring from the customer's perspective. What might be the behavior they might exhibit that might make them more likely to WANT to engage with a sales person. Things like filling out a "Contact Us" form, looking at a pricing sheet online or asking questions on a blog or on Facebook or Twitter are signals that they just might be ready to talk with a sales person. We all do things that signal our intent when we're ready to buy (at Sears, I usually wave a can of paint around by the check stand until a clerk shows up to take my money or have me arrested). Make sure you're tuned in to the behavioral patterns that signal deeper interest and you'll be sure to develop a scoring system that works for buyers as well as your sales team.

Thirdly, be flexible. The world's most complex and comprehensive scoring system is a failure if it doesn't identify leads that are sales ready and retains those who aren't in a marketing program. You'll find that you're going to need to adjust your scoring criteria at least quarterly for the first year while you tune and refine your system. Beware of the person who refers to the "lead scoring project" and remind them that this is a process, not a one-and-done initiative, and that you'll continue to refine it over time.

Steve Gershik
28Marketing
www.28marketing.com

Lots of great information here. As we know, the benefits of Lead Scoring is increasing close rates and obtaining more revenue per deal. As such, lead scoring, as an element of marketing automation, is crucial within our goal to align marketing and sales. Here's our approach:

1. Set the stage with a proper scale for scoring. We like to use 1-100. Then we begin the process of audience identification and make a list of all the explicit and implicit factors that should be scored. For example:
a. Explicit Factors- Who the prospects are: Industry, Title, Buying decision time frame, etc.
b. Implicit Factors- What the prospect does: web pages visited, downloads, email clicks, etc.

We plan the above with representatives of marketing AND sales to further align the organization and insure the target audiences are defined properly.

2. By implementing marketing automation with properly prepared webforms, the execution of lead scoring begins. We also consider "negative" scores (subtract 10 points) such as AOL email addresses, incomplete data, etc in order to weed out non quality leads.

3. The last factor in lead scoring implementation is determining the grade level as a prelude to CRM transfer. This of course needs to be tested. We usually start at a 30 threshold then work with the sales force to measure conversion rates and quality lead factors. Like any "media buy" scoring models should always be reviewed to make sure the sales people do get the quality sales-ready leads at the right time. Lead scoring can get complex, so it's important to test and review.

Paul Mosenson
NuSpark Marketing
http://www.nusparkmarketing.com

Lots of great advice here, so I’m definitely chiming in with advice that has already been given. However, if I had to pick the three most crucial elements of success in lead scoring, they would be:

1) Split Your Score Between “Fit” and “Engagement”. Fit is the right buyer (right executive, right role, right geography, ideal industry, etc), and engagement is an indication of current interest. If you have a buyer who is not currently interested in buying, you won’t be able to connect with them, regardless of how theoretically ideal they are, and if you have a highly interested person who is not at a company that is likely to buy, you will waste a lot of time for nothing. These two dimensions are very different and guide different sales actions.

2) Iterate Towards Perfection. A perfect lead score that sales does not act on is far less valuable than a pretty good lead score that sales works with and responds to. Start with a good, directional, indicator that sales agrees to and then work on the handoff process to make sure sales is actively adopting the process changes involved in working with scored leads. Once you have that in place, you can iterate towards an even more precise score.

3) Take Data Seriously. Too many organizations have inaccurately qualified an “A” lead as a “D” lead because data was missing, not normalized, or low quality. Normalize all your titles, industries, geographies, and revenue ranges so that you have a clean data set to score off of (ie, “V. P Marketing”, “Vice Pres Mktg”, “VP of Marketing” should all be normalized to “Vice President Marketing”). Without that, your scores that are output will reflect the low quality of the data going in.

Craig:

Thanks for the question and have enjoyed reading the responses so far. I think it is important to understand that where a lot of companies go wrong in lead scoring is they jump right into the assigning of points and forget to realize that lead scoring is one part of the overall lead qualification process.

As for my three top tips they are as follows:

1. Defining the Lead Taxonomy: Marketing and sales must work in a collaborative fashion to define the terms used i.e. response, lead, sales accepted lead, etc. if they are going to have a successful lead qualification process.

Once this is completed, they must continue working to define the qualification attributes that will be applied to the definitions. From there, the numerical values can be applied to complete a scoring model.

By working collaboratively, marketing and sales will better align around qualification leading to increased conversion rates and overall improved attention to sales.

2. Go beyond BANT: I see many organizations that are still utilizing the BANT criteria (Budget, Authority, Need, Time Frame) as their sole qualification criteria. Using this model will deliver a good number of false leads as well as keep an organization from getting true leads. Many buyers do not want to provide this information during the process and as a result will either abandon the form/conversation or provide fasle information.

To get the most from the lead qualification/scoring begin rating by demographic and behavioral information. To do so, requires work on the various buyer persona's (another marketing & sales point of collaboration), but will provide a more holistic view and better qualified lead.

3. Score Progressively: Given the fact that as many as 70% of respondents are not in buy mode when engaging with your company, there is no need to try and collect huge amounts of data at first engagement. By trying to qualify a first time respondent, you will most likely deter them from further engagement. Take the time to engage with them, offer relevant content in exchange for more information and score as you move through the relationship. This process will produce a more qualified, more engaged lead.

Lead qualification/scoring is a vital component for organizations looking to improve conversions and create more revenue. However, to get the most from it, understand it should be viewed holistically within the greater Lead Management Framework(TM).

Carlos Hidalgo
The Annuitas Group
@cahidalgo

And I agree with Justin, it would be great to have a file share function.

To Steve's points above he elaborated on this with a great blog post for us a few weeks back - one of the best pieces I have read on Lead Scoring:

http://www.annuitasgroup.com/2010/11/quality-matters-analyzing-the-effect-of-...

Carlos Hidalgo
The Annuitas Group
@cahidalgo

hey Craig, great question. In my work with small business owners, we keep things pretty simple. I have used and recommend www.optify.net because they let me do lead scoring on my website traffic, in an easy to use dashboard. I can adjust simple metrics around demographics (where they are from) to how often they visit, etc. I can also heavily weight based on the annual revenues for the company that is visiting my site.

I'm constantly trying to look at the conversation and activity in the social streams and how they impact a lead converting. I use Twitter a lot and it drives a lot of traffic. Seeing how a campaign works or doesn't work. Integrating social metrics into what pages a visitor sees, path they follow.

On a very tactical level, have they filled out my website form completely? Only some fields are required, but many times people will share more info. They do that to try and solve a serious pain point and so I score them higher than the person who just hits the required fields.

Full disclosure: I did a couple of webinar projects in early 2010 for Optify as a moderator, however I do use their tools on my own sites and client sites.