Lead scoring serves as an essential strategy for categorizing potential clients according to their potential value to an organization. This technique is instrumental in identifying prospects most likely to convert into customers. In addition it’s a great way to interact with existing prospects that cross the threshold and are ready to re-engage.
Understanding Scoring
At its core, lead scoring effectively targets potential customers within your database. This can be implemented through various methods, including sales strategies and interactions during events. The key goal is to pinpoint the ideal individuals at just the right time to encourage significant engagement.
It’s crucial, however, to employ lead scoring wisely. Harmonizing the efforts of marketing and sales teams is critical. Misuse of lead scoring can result in overwhelming sales personnel with unready leads, wasting valuable time and resources. Conversely, when applied thoughtfully, scoring becomes an essential criterion for engaging with a lead, promoting more efficient use of time and resources.
The Dynamic Nature of Scoring
Contrary to some beliefs, scoring isn’t a static system. Regular revisions, ideally every 3-4 months, are necessary. As market conditions fluctuate, leads previously considered irrelevant may become pertinent, and vice versa. Even minor changes, like new job titles, can impact your scoring system.
Sales Cycles Variations
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B2C (Business to Consumer) Here, individuals make purchases for personal use. The B2C sales cycle is usually swift, ranging from a few days with either multiple or single item purchases.
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B2B (Business to Business) B2B cycles are longer, often spanning months. They involve larger budgets and multiple stages, including establishing contact, nurturing interest, conducting product demos, and obtaining approvals from several decision-makers.
In B2C, demographic factors like age and gender are crucial, while trust-building is vital in B2B due to multiple interactions along the customer journey.
Pro Tip : Distinguish between ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and engagement score for better control over the sales cycle. For example you may have a lead in high engagement but the ICP is low so blending both can be really confusing.
Building Your Scoring Components
There are four main elements to consider:
1. ICP
2. Contact Categories
3. Company Categories
4. Maturity Categories
Engagement: This metric increases over a lead’s lifetime.
Decay: This measures decreasing engagement over time, helping differentiate between similar scoring leads based on their interaction patterns.
Grading / Scoring: Opt for a letter grading system over numbers for clarity. Pay close attention to borderline cases to understand nuanced differences.
Integrating Scoring in HubSpot
In Hubspot you can create as many scoring fields as you like.
Grading score is essentially ‘how much we want the prospect’. To calculate it you can use static values like – country, industry, job title, number of employees, technologies used, annual revenue and basically anything that comes to mind and should be considered in this equation. You can create a different Grading score for specific products that you sell
Here is an example of how to set a grading score (for this specific client we named it as ICP score)
Engagement Score is oriented to customer behavior, emails clicked. Emails opened, website visits, sales emails sent Vs sales emails replied, form submissions, unique form submissions etc.. you can also incorporate the scoring with 3rd party applications that provide the magical client intent.
Here is an example how to set engagement score:
*In the example we reduce points on time decay and on the left we add points based on interaction with our website. Feel free to explore on your own, there are plenty of exciting options.
Pro Tip : You can summarize the scoring to the company level and provide an holistic company level scoring.
Identify the Threshold
While ICP score is kind of simple to define, engagement score is more challenging since it’s very dynamic and the results for each contact in your CRM may vary from 0 to 2935 points.. How do I know what the threshold is? Assuming that the ICP is high, how do I know what is the right threshold to trigger engagement?
The answer requires basic math and excel knowledge
We have seen major success while doing the following –
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Once you are done setting engagement score it will calculate the value for each record in the CRM. Formula fields are running values, they change all the time and they are calculated backwards which is awesome for us in this case.
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Query for contacts that made it to deal creation or to become an SQL / SAL depends on your business flow.
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Summarize the total number of all contacts and divide it by the amount of contacts that you extracted.
For example if you extracted 1000 contacts that recently became life cycle stage ‘opportunity’ and the total score is 86,137 then the threshold is 86 points.
Conclusion
Use scoring to bubble up leads in your existing data-base and plan your own strategy around it. You may have existing leads that faded out through the sales process but are still engaged with your brand. You can loop them into a hot nurturing drip and end it with a personal sales email.
* In this example we got an inbound lead with high engagement score and low icp score
Embrace scoring to enhance the synergy between your marketing and sales teams. Maintain separate scoring elements for customization and control. Effective scoring involves identifying and engaging the right prospects at the ideal time.
