Written by Jon Miller, author of the Modern B2B Marketing blog and VP of Marketing for lead management software company, Marketo
Most leads from B2B marketing campaigns are still researching. Prematurely passing these early leads to sales only annoys the buyer and makes sales even less likely to follow-up on marketing leads. This means the majority of inquiries require further lead nurturing before they become sales ready, so marketers also need the ability to know when to try to nudge the prospect to the next stage and when to pull back and give the prospect some space.
This is where lead scoring comes in. Lead scoring is the process of determining a prospect’s level of interest in your solution (engagement), as well as your interest in a prospect (demographics targeting). When used effectively, lead scoring means you will pass fewer, but higher quality, leads to sales. By not wasting sales time on low quality leads, reps can focus on just the high quality leads — meaning wins rates and sales productivity go up. In fact, as little as a 10% increase in lead quality can generate a 40% increase in sales productivity. In a world where the sales department costs equal 20 or 30% of total revenue, this kind of improvement means a dramatic impact on the bottom line.
How can you use lead scoring to achieve this kind of benefit for your organization?
First of all, too many companies use only basic demographic data (e.g. title, company size, etc.) in scoring. This is useful, but demographic data only tell how interested you are in the prospect—and nothing about how interested the prospect is in you. Even BANT criteria (budget, authority, timing, and need) have limited usefulness since buyers’ answers to those questions are notoriously inaccurate, and as we all know, people’s actions speak louder than their words. This means you should also track a lead’s behaviors so you can you measure their interest and engagement in your solution.
Begin by monitoring and tracking online behaviors, such as email responses, completed forms, and Web site visits. You can do this manually with web analytics, or automate the process using marketing automation software. Assign a point value to each, just as you would assign a value to each job title. Certain behaviors – such as using your company brand name in a search, visiting your pricing page, or returning frequently to your site – indicate higher readiness to buy, so assign even higher weights to those behaviors. Since B2B purchases typically involve 6 to 21 different people, add up the scores for each contact at a given company to measure the total level of engagement for that organization. Finally, be sure to lower the score over time if engagement goes down.
Review the point values with the sales team, and decide what score indicates sales-readiness. If the sales team determines a prospect is not yet ready, recycle the lead back to marketing for additional nurturing. Finally, be sure to close the loop and refine your scoring rules and point values over time for continuous improvement.
Want more details? Here’s a link to a free eBook from Marketo called Best Practices in Lead Scoring.
