Effective lead scoring models result in identifying marketing qualified leads (MQLs). When models are implemented correctly, this process will save your sales team an inordinate amount of time while also increasing business revenue. Demand Gen Report's 2016 Lead Scoring Survey found that “more than half of respondents experienced improved marketing and sales alignment from scoring, and more than 40% saw improved conversion rates among leads.”
If your business is looking to implement a lead scoring model, you’ll want to make sure that it accounts for the 3 most critical lead scoring components: facts, behavior, and time.
Facts
What facts have you collected about your contacts? These can include: geographic location, company, title, years of service, contact info etc. Knowing the basics about your prospects is an important part of converting them into a customer. When you design your lead scoring model, you can define which facts will have a positive impact and which will have a negative impact on their score. For example, if you only serve certain regions of the country, and a prospect is located outside of that region, then a negative point value would be attached to that fact. Determining the point values for each fact will help you identify your top prospects. And the beautiful part is nothing is set in stone. These values can be adjusted and tweaked over time until you find the right formula that provides the desired result.
Behavior
Analyzing behavior will provide incredible insights into the specific interests prospects have in the products or services your business offers. There are many different behaviors that can be monitored. Depending on your specific business, you can determine and assign point values that rank these behaviors accordingly. Some behaviors you may consider assigning point values to when creating the lead scoring model are:
- Social media engagement - Are they following you, liking posts, or commenting?
- Blog - Do they regularly visit or comment on your blog?
- Multiple Employees -Have several employees from the same company visited your website in a specific time period?
- Downloads - What free offers have they taken advantage of (ebooks, whitepapers, videos, webinars)?
- Open & Click Thru Rates - Do they open emails that you send? Do they click on the links in those emails?
- Events - Have they participated or attended either in person or online events?
As you begin to track these behaviors you will begin to see trends as to what types of behaviors signify buyer readiness.
Time
Monitoring the amount time prospects are interacting with your website along with the frequency of those behaviors is extremely important. Questions you will want to track include:
- How often are prospects visiting your website?
- How long are they staying on the website?
- Has an identified period of time passed since their last interaction with you?
Additionally, tracking time associated with behaviors can help you indicate problems as well. For example, if a large number of prospects are bouncing after visiting a certain page, it would be a good idea to evaluate that page. Make sure the layout isn’t the problem (is it a responsive website), that no errors are occurring, or that the call-to-action that sent them to that page is appropriate.
Understanding and tracking these lead scoring components will not only help you provide sales with the best and most likely to convert leads, but it will also assist in goal setting. Over time, you will be able to predict conversion rates and identify the number of leads you need to have in the sales funnel to hit your monthly and yearly sales goals. From there, you can work backwards to identify where and how you will promote your products to get the necessary visibility (eyes on your marketing materials/promos) in order to attract those leads.
By implementing these 3 lead scoring components you will be well on your way to creating an effective lead scoring model. If your business has questions or needs help with its marketing technology strategy, we want to hear from you. Please email or call us at 571-606-3106.
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