The question the marketing and sales team need to know is what is the worthiness of this lead to our company? The ability to score leads means no wasted energy is focused on a lead that is unlikely to buy, based on the information collected on them.
Utilising a tool like HubSpot to score leads can improve marketing effects, improve the alignment between marketing and sales departments, and generate real business opportunities.
HubSpot recommends six different scoring models based on the type of data collected from prospects who engaged in some way with your business. The better the quality of the data, the better the scoring results.
1. Demographic Information
High scoring leads who fit into your target audience criteria. If you are targeting C-level executives, low score against lower-level leads. And negatively score interns or students from your list. Rank your target audience in relation to who your decision-makers in your audience. Some job titles may be influencers to the decision-maker and should not be disregarded.
Age, location, and gender are also determining demographic elements you need to consider. You may need to negatively score against a lead who falls outside your target locations. This depends on your product and service.
Demographic scores should be built with your personae in mind.
2. Company Information
Business to Business (B2B) selling depends on the type of organization that meet your target criteria. Namely, the size of the company, type of business, the company revenue, and the industry.
If your ideal target audience is an SME company, a company with 10000+ headcount would be a negative scoring against the lead. If you are looking for businesses in the Automobile industry, a lead within such industry will have a positive scoring.
3. Online Behaviour
The behaviour of your target audience online and how they interact with your online platforms, for example, your website, is a clear indication of just how interested they are in your service.
Focusing on the behaviour of prospects who are now clients, understand which content they consumed, what offers they downloaded or any events they signed up to. That way you get a better picture of what content works for your type of audience.
Scoring a lead on activities such as 10 website visits in a week, filling in high-value forms like demo requests, or requesting a callback and quote. These leads can be allocated higher scorings, compared to a lead that maybe hasn't interacted with your business in over 6 months (depending on your sales cycle timeline).
4. Email Engagement
Email marketing is a strong and economic tool at the disposal of marketing teams. A prospect who immediately unsubscribes from your mailing list has less interest, compared to a lead who clicks on call-to-actions or downloads content.
Negatively scoring a lead that opts-out, out and positively scoring a lead who interacts allows you to scale them on more likely to buy, to less or unlikely to buy.
5. Social Engagement
As more people are working from home, using lead generation tactics through social media pages like LinkedIn has proven to be more successful, especially in B2B lead generation. Depending on your target audiences' behaviours, understand which of your available social media platforms works better.
A lead that views, shares, comments, mails or any form of interaction is a positive scoring. If a lead signs up for a LinkedIn event you are hosting, they can be allocated a high score.
Identify which interactions hold more value and score accordingly. EG:
- Likes a blog post: 5 points
- Registers for an event: 40 points
- Sends a message requesting a sales call: 60 points
6. Spam Detection
Business email addresses tend to hold more value in communication efforts with leads. Low score email addresses that use Gmail, Yahoo!, outlook.com, etc. To help high score leads that fill in forms that use their business addresses.
Give low scores to leads who fill out forms in a way that could indicate they are spam, for example using only zeros in the phone number text box.
Maven TM builds score leads based on the client's needs, the campaign goals, and personas. Utilizing the above six models, we are able to build up a reliable score that allows our clients to target their sales team at leads who are higher rated and more than likely to make a purchase.
