Lead scoring is generally a feature found in most marketing automation solutions, but it is often underused or poorly used. You should score your leads by lead stage to help your sales teams make better use of their time.
Lead scoring is more effective when your marketing automation platform allows you to configure a minimum threshold for the score to be achieved across the different contact scoring dimensions: contact (who they are) and activity (what they do). This allows you to ensure a minimum level of quality for your leads.
Sales and marketing must collaborate
This is to define the stages. Generally, they are as follows: Prospect, MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads), SAL (Sales Acceptable Leads), SQL (Sales Qualified Leads), Won, but this may vary depending on your sales qualification processes. Here is an example.
Lead Stages:
- Prospect – All contacts in the database
- Lead – Identifiable (with at least an email) who shows interest in your product/service.
- Qualified lead – Either a salesperson has had an exchange with the contact, or they requested a demo, or you know that they are going to buy a solution
- Imminent opportunity – Demo and/or qualification completed. Follow-up actions required.
- Opportunity – Follow-up actions completed (e.g. documentation & co.).
- Quote – Quote sent
- Won – Has become a customer
You may very well find similar stages in your CRM for tracking your opportunities.
An example of lead scoring:
- A Prospect fills out a form and becomes a Lead (Score: 10. Changes the lead stage to “Lead”. Activity score: 10).
- The Lead opens (5 pts) and clicks (5 pts) in an autoresponder email after submitting the form (Engagement score: 2 x 5)
- The form asked for profession and the Lead entered “Marketing”, which is important for us. (Contact score: 25).
- The Lead visits 4 more pages (Activity score: 5 per page = 20).
The “Lead” lead stage has a point threshold of 25 for the contact, 30 for activity, and 10 for engagement.
Thus, this new lead exceeds the threshold established at this stage. You can now move on to similar exercises for each defined lead stage.
Consider doing an exercise with a few key members of the sales and marketing team in order to identify:
- The lead stages you want to track
- The data you want to collect on contacts at each stage
- The contact’s activities to validate their belonging to each stage
- The minimum score to reach for each stage
This may take several weeks of work to achieve a complete and relevant result. You will need to define your buyer personas beforehand, an essential element of an effective marketing automation strategy.
