Erin Moore
The process of cold calling is one that has been dreaded by both marketers and potential customers for years. Thankfully, this practice is becoming increasingly outdated and is being replaced by lead scoring.
What is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring is a mechanism that allows you to prioritize your leads for sales based on behavior and demographic data, and alert them when it is time for a follow up.
Simply put, it allows you to monitor your leads as they go through the process of transitioning from a lead to a sales qualified lead (SQL). Lead scoring allows you to monitor revisits to your website, email opens and social shares.
How does lead scoring work?
A contact will come to your website and fill out a form. Once that form is filled out, they will be automatically added to your database where all of their demographics and future actions will be recorded. Based on all of this information the contact is then scored according to how likely they are to be receptive to sales. The higher they score the better the chances are that sales will be able to convert them into customers.
If the contact scores high enough they will automatically become an MQL, which will then send you an email notifying you of this change. It is then up to you to decide whether or not you want to pursue the lead. If accepted they will become and SQL and transition over from the marketing side to the sales side.
Scoring attributes in HubSpot
Setting up a lead scoring worksheet
So how do you decide what criteria a contact needs to meet in order to be scored? The quickest and simplest way to do this is to set up an excel worksheet that lists out various positive and negative attributes with their designated score between 1-100. These attributes can include demographics (job title, location, etc.), company info like industry and annual revenue, or their online behavior including form completion and website visits.
Once complete you will enter in these attributes with their scores and run a test to see if the scores are appropriate. Testing can be done by scoring contacts that you think should either be high or low. If they don’t fall into your expected range, then you know you need to tweak the scores.
Sample lead scoring worksheet
Lead Scoring Best Practices
In order to have lead scoring working most effectively you want to follow these best practices.
- Define your Lifecycle and Lead Stages.
- Fill out your lead scoring criteria spreadsheet with all of your attributes and scores before you enter them into the database.
- Program your lead scoring criteria and test, test, test. Make the appropriate changes to ensure your contacts are testing the way you expect them to.
- Document all of your final lead scoring criteria.
- Set up a final process for maintaining your lead scoring database.
TREW is a marketing agency dedicated to reaching engineering and technical audiences through a range of marketing initiatives. Contact us today to learn more about the services we offer.
Erin Moore
Erin has worked with 50+ technical companies across website strategy, content development, sales enablement, and marketing tool stack development. She’s a strategy-first marketer with a passion for persona development and a deep understanding of how marketing metrics tie into the bottom line. Erin holds a B.S. in public relations with a minor in anthropology from the University of Florida. She lives in Austin, TX, with her husband John and their dog and cat.
About TREW Marketing
TREW Marketing is a strategy-first content marketing agency serving B2B companies that target highly technical buyers. With deep experience in the design, embedded, measurement and automation, and software industries, TREW Marketing provides branding, marketing strategy, content development, and digital marketing services to help customers efficiently and effectively achieve business goals.