Tag Archives: lead scoring

Turn Your Top Prospects into MQL’s with Lead Scoring

August 18, 2022 admin

How To Scout Players For The Pros? Score. Select. Offer. WIN.

If a professional sports team wants to become a dynasty, that organization will absolutely need to have a top notch scouting network. Sure, a team may be at the top of their game now, but time changes everything. Top players will leave or retire. Unforeseen injuries will impact the lineup. The team’s ownership needs a steady stream of talent coming through their pipeline to replace those losses and improve the team.

Your business also needs a way to be continually looking towards the future by building out their client lists. You can think of the marketing department as the talent scouts for your company’s team. The Adobe Marketo Engage platform can help you build a scoring program that tracks your prospects from unknown all the way through the sales funnel. Once Marketo Engage knows about a prospect, their actions will be able to push them through each stage of the sales cycle, assessing their quality and if they are deserving of a roster spot.

Assessing The Pipeline

Your scoring program should be the result of a collaboration between your Marketing and Sales teams. The two groups need to be candid with each other. Transparency will only benefit the end product. This conversation should range from email campaigns to job titles to business size to webinars to physical trade shows and even more depending on the number of channels you utilize. How important is each facet of your approach to generating a sale?

The point is they will need to assign value to prospects’ demographics and actions. What are the most likely things that will lead to a sales opportunity? The two departments should devote significant resources to the project. If you have strong reporting already, you should be going through it in detail. Without formal data, you could start with some standard industry best practices and rely on anecdotal input from sales representatives.

Each demographic quality and action can be assigned values depending on how their relative importance is viewed. At what collective value of actions and demographics does the sales team think a prospect is ready to be sold to? Once determined, this threshold is when a prospect becomes a MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead). Just like a scouting network, Marketo Engage is sorting through all of your prospects and only bringing Sales those that are good for the team.

Finding The Right Prospect

Your business will decide what actions are most predictive of sales opportunities that closed successfully. Leadous can help you translate those decisions into a working Marketo Engage program, meaning your instance will be customized for your organization. You can leverage our expertise and experience to build any scoring program no matter how complex. We can help you make sure everything is built according to best practices so you can be confident in the way your prospects are accumulating points on their journey towards becoming MQLs.

If you had to establish your scoring program without hard data, simply by getting one up and running, you will have drastically improved your reporting capabilities which is very beneficial in and of itself. Just as a sports team’s needs change over time leading to changing interest in specific players, the scoring program will need to be revisited as you periodically reassess the scores you assigned to your demographics and actions. Actions that were once highly predictive may become more loosely correlated with positive outcomes over time. Expansion could place greater emphasis on new regional demographics. You may even find that your MQL threshold needs to be adjusted.

You need to revisit your scoring program to make sure it stays reliable. You will never make it perfect. The most promising player can still unexpectedly blow out a knee. Your goal should be refining the program to be as close to perfect as possible. Incorporate patterns and lessons learned from incorrectly identified MQLs to update your program.

You can also decide what to do with a record that MQL’d but still did not lead to a sales opportunity. Should they be recycled back into your marketing programs? If so, try to incorporate modifications to typical procedures in order to make them more likely to work out to a positive outcome on the next attempt. If not, sometimes a player just is not what the team needs, and the talent scouts need to move on.

Build Your Dynasty

A well developed scoring program will make both Marketing and Sales happier in the long run. It allows both departments to focus their energies in the most productive places. The Sales Team gets to gain confidence that the contacts they work with are more receptive to their efforts. The Marketing Team gains data that proves the effectiveness of their initiatives and how they lead to revenue.

The Leadous team is happy to guide you through the construction and maintenance of a scoring program that becomes a reliable model for your business. We can help your marketing department become the talent scouts that make sure your team never has a down year and is always in the discussion for a championship season. Reach out to an expert today.

Obsessed With Marketing Automation

Lead Scores are to Marketing Like Credit Scores are to Finance

April 11, 2022 admin

Credit scoring has become foundational to the current financial system. It was conceived and has evolved to track and rate the history of a person’s financial choices. Through years of refinement in terms of both tracking and scoring individual actions, credit scoring became critical to anyone in the business of lending money. The Marketo Engage platform can build out a scoring system that your sales team can treat like their own personally curated Equifax score.

Lean Into the Idea

A lead scoring system built in Marketo should be developed cooperatively between the marketing and sales teams. The two departments will need to have an open and honest collaboration. The discussion will be wide-ranging covering the perceived values of everything from favorable demographic qualities to attending trade shows to simply clicking through to your landing pages.

The point is to assess what actions and/or conditions have traditionally been those most likely to lead to sales opportunities for your company. Devote the planning and resources necessary to make sure your plan is a predictive tool your sales team can rely on. If you have data you can already study, you should be diving deep. If you do not have formal data, you can start with typical industry practices and anecdotal input from the sales representatives.

Determine the Threshold

Different demographic categories and various actions can all be assigned different values. The more favorably your company views the action, the higher the value of the associated score. Taking a view of all the possible ways a contact can accumulate points, you will need to decide at what point value the sales team would consider accepting a lead.

If you have set up your model correctly, the sales team’s new leads will have already absorbed enough information about your services that they will find these contacts are ready to take things to the next level. This threshold is typically what determines when a contact becomes a marketing qualified lead (MQL). Just like a bank will take an Equifax score as proof that someone is a good candidate to open a credit card, the salespeople in your organization will be able to accept a MQL status as proof they should focus their efforts on that contact.

Your Lead Scoring Model, Your Way

Your organization will determine what actions are most predictive of a Closed Won sales opportunity. These choices will determine the logic and actions of the campaigns in Marketo, meaning your Marketo instance will be tailored to fit your specific needs. The logic will be yours, but Leadous can help your organization make sure the actual Marketo programs are built with best practices in mind to ensure leads are scored and sent to sales as MQLs.

Even if you started from a place without hard data, once your campaigns are running in Marketo, you will have strong reporting capabilities. Using this data, you should periodically revisit your scoring campaigns. Keep refining your logic. Keep working on how you are collecting your data. Trends can and will change, and what was once highly predictive may become only loosely correlated. It can even be such that the MQL threshold itself needs to be reassessed.

The point of these reviews is not to achieve perfection, but to continue to work toward it. While the scoring model will be reliable, it will not be absolute. Even people with excellent credit scores can end up defaulting on their payments. However, you can use even these situations to reflect on potential modifications to the model. You can decide if you think recycling a record back through more marketing is a viable path, and what, if any, modifications to the marketing they would receive as they possibly work their way back toward being a MQL again.

Make Your Scoring Model Its Own Institution

When the scoring model is implemented and refined, everyone should be happier. Both departments will be able to focus their energies in the most productive places. The sales team will be working with contacts more likely to make a purchase. The marketing team will be able to demonstrate how their efforts lead to success. Properly maintained, over time, your program will gain a positive internal reputation as everyone around it recognizes its value.

The Leadous team can help guide you through the process. We have tools and experience that can help you strategize around your specific use case. Our experts will keep you on track and make sure your team avoids common scoring pitfalls.

For more information on Lead Scoring contact us at info@leadous.com

Obsessed With Marketing Automation

Lead Scoring – It’s Spooky

October 13, 2021 admin

A quick search for ‘Lead Scoring’ tells you all about the methodology of assigning leads points for their demographic and behavior data to better qualify people for sales teams. Adobe has ‘The Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring’ and countless other docs to tell you what and how. They all agree and so do we, that without automation and CRM integration lead scoring is a nightmare! This spooky season I want to share more eerie, spine tingling stories of ghostly lead scores that decay, scoring models brought back from the dead and leads that never die, they live on as lifelong customers.

Ghosts and Decay
A simple first step for implementing lead scoring is to initially grant points for specific demographic and firmographic data. Marketing teams are often stuck at this level of scoring and scoring models are abandoned because a solid scoring model needs more data. To build a robust lead scoring system a company needs to account for behavioral data as well. Marketing Automation platforms allow for tracking how the lead interacts with company communication. It also allows for tracking when a lead stops interacting with the company and how long it has been since the lead showed interest. In other words – how long have they been ghosting you? If a lead hasn’t interacted with the company, hasn’t opened emails or visited your site it’s time to implement score decay and begin to subtract points from their lead score. This insight helps sales teams filter which leads are responsive and which are unresponsive.

Leadous Brings Scoring Models Back From the Dead
Many companies have some version of scoring in place but lead scoring is a dynamic process; it requires constant attention or it dies. Refreshing your existing lead scoring process produces the most current and effective lead scoring model. It allows marketing and sales to collaborate on the Ideal Customer Profile and strengthens alignment between the teams as they work toward a common goal. Leadous will help you maximize your efficiencies, develop a strong lead generation strategy and build out your lead scoring capabilities to bring your current system back from the brink of death or help you iterate your model so it works for today.

Leads that Never Die (They Just Live On as Customers)
Lead Scoring models are built to qualify leads so that sales can start conversations with the most qualified leads and eventually turn those sales accepted leads into opportunities, but often these leads are lost to marketing once sales is involved. By utilizing marketing automation and CRM integration in lead scoring, marketing teams can track the quantity and value of their work from the first moment a customer raises their hand throughout the entire sales process. By tracking the amount of MQLs that turn into SQLs, marketing can prove their effectiveness and provide efficiencies for their sales team or uncover opportunities to redefine the Ideal Customer Profile or the entire scoring model. The best leads don’t die, they live on as your best customers.

Want more information on starting or re-starting your company’s lead scoring program contact us now or visit our Resources page.

Tips

Make Lead Scoring Work For You. How To Know A Lead Is Worth the Time.

March 1, 2021 admin 3 Comments

It’s the question on your sales team’s minds when they see that new lead notification from marketing. With the myriad of tasks sales is juggling, it’s understandable they need a system to be able to prioritize which leads are “drop everything now and call” and which leads can be put into an automated follow up sequence.

So how can you better tag and prioritize leads for your sales team? That’s where lead scoring comes in.

Lead scoring measures the explicit and implicit behavior of the lead (more on that below) to rate the sales readiness of a new prospect, ultimately answering these two questions:

Is this lead ready to buy?
Propensity to Buy: Where are the prospects in the buying cycle? Are they ready to purchase your product tomorrow or two years from now? Are they just beginning their online search or are they evaluating you against your competitors? Are they ready for a demo or just kicking the tires to learn more about you?

Is this lead a good fit for our products or services?
Product Fit: Are the prospects a good fit for your business? Do they look like your best customers? Should sales be putting in the same level of effort to engage them if they won’t be able to use your products or services to the fullest extent?

Fortunately, many of those questions can be automatically answered for your sales team using lead scoring.

Lead scoring is the collaboration of sales and marketing to rank leads. By setting automated rules in Marketo to rank leads by A, B, C, or D (or hot, warm, cold), your sales team can gain more insight into which leads are ready to engage, which ones need more nurturing from marketing, and which leads just may never be a good fit for your business.

Getting the Basics Down

There are two components of lead scoring you need to understand to build out a successful lead scoring program: explicit scoring and implicit scoring.

With explicit scoring, prospects tell you information about themselves based on demographic or firmographic information. This can be through a form fill where a prospect tells you her job title, company size, geographic location, and so on. Or you can update this information from your own database. Explicit scoring is usually determined by your company’s sales targets. Which job titles or company size are the best fit for your company? Are you only accepting leads in certain areas of the world? Scoring a lead based on these factors tells your sales team how qualified this lead is by set factors in your target demographics.

With implicit scoring, you infer information based on the prospect’s behavior. This can be through webinar views, white paper downloads, web page visits, and so on. You can assign specific scores so that when a prospect fills out a contact us form she gets more points than, say, downloading a white paper. Or on the flip side, if a prospect unsubscribes from an email list or only visits the careers page on your website and no other pages, points are removed. These are all key behaviors that signal how ready a prospect is for your business.

In case you’re not yet convinced that lead scoring can help improve your sales and marketing processes, here are 4 benefits of lead scoring that many of our clients see:

Better align sales and marketing, so only qualified leads are going to sales and leads that need more time are being actively nurtured.
Define a lead hand-off process that makes both sales and marketing more efficient and productive.
Better estimate the deals in your pipeline so you can plan according to what deals are more likely to close, and when.
Save your sales team time and effort by making sure they’re focusing on the contacts and accounts with the best fit for your business.

“A solid lead scoring approach not only helps to rank prospects against one another, but can smooth the lead flow and serve as the baseline for building a range of business rules that include ownership, role and activities.” -SiriusDecisions, What’s the Score

Lead scoring is a great foundation to build better alignment between your sales and marketing teams, and strengthen the impact of your marketing efforts. By ensuring you’re only engaging with prospects at a time when it will resonate the most, you’re saving time, money and effort!

Have any questions about getting started with lead scoring or taking your lead scoring to the next level? Contact us.