If you’re like many business owners we’ve worked with, you have leads, but you’re having trouble making sure you’re spending your time and resources on the ones most ready to buy. Nothing is more frustrating than wasting energy on cold leads. Part of the problem is that your marketing efforts may not bring you and your team the best leads. It’s a common problem. You need lead scoring to sort this out.

"The Most Important Part of Lead Scoring is Not Lead Scoring"

As we said in the intro, if you’re doing lead scoring, you’re either doing it right or you’re doing it wrong. We haven’t seen much in between.

So what’s the difference? What sets the rock stars apart from the losers? The secret to success is not in the actual lead scoring. The success begins well before.

You have to know your business.

We’re big fans of businesses that think in terms of lifecycle marketing. Lifecycle marketing refers to marketing and sales campaign strategies that address your customer’s needs over time. Lifecycle marketing will help you:

• Generate more revenue by attracting leads and wowing your existing customers

• Make your sales and marketing efforts more efficient, saving you time and money

Lead-scoring rock stars understand this principle and integrate it as their core sales and marketing strategy.

HubSpot preaches a clean, simple, and very effective lifecycle marketing strategy that has helped thousands of businesses:

Attract, Sell, Wow

In a nutshell, this three-part strategy looks like this:

1. Attract: Clarify who your best customers are, identify what they need, and understand how to connect with them.

2. Sell: Create content that connects with your customers and guides them through the buying process.

3. Wow: Anticipate your customers’ needs, go the extra mile, and deliver more than you promised.

Want to know more about this Concept? 

We have a great resource that goes deep into the Attract, Sell, Wow lifecycle marketing strategy.

Lead scoring functionally falls into the Sell and Wow phases, which we’ll discuss in chapters three and four.

But to get ready for that, you have to set up the Attract phase, which follows:

You have to know your customer.

Ultimately, lifecycle marketing isn’t much use if you don’t know who your customers are. You'll be taking shots in the dark without a clear sense of who is into your products and services.

You can’t afford to waste resources like that. And it’s wicked expensive to try to reach everybody.

The solution? Create buyer personas to help you be sure you target the right people. Depending on how many products and services you offer, you may want to create several personas to correspond with the kinds of people that personify your customer base.

To be clear, we’re not talking about demographics, which are powerful and mandatory to your company’s growth. But they don’t tell you anything about your customer’s personality. Demographics describe statistics about your ideal customer.

Customer personas put a face on the people who run those businesses. Personas are like character sketches using the buyer’s language. Include key details about them, such as:

• Age
• Income level
• Industry
• Tech Savviness
• Job Title

Why do they seek your products/services?

The content you produce should target these personas, and knowing them will help you keep your marketing efforts on track.

Think about it. The Ramones weren’t writing songs for soccer mums. OK, some soccer mums might jam out to Judy Was a Punk in their SUVs, but they weren’t the target.

Disaffected urban teens of baby boomer parents tended to be the main persona.

So, if the Ramones were to make a customer profile, they might make it something like this:

Judy S. Punk. 19 years old, living in a crumby apartment in Brooklyn, doesn’t talk to her parents much. She works a crappy day job to go to punk shows at night. She loves the Ramones and buys their merchandise. She also loves the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Stiff Little Fingers. She hopes someday to play in a punk band of her own. (I will grow up driving an SUV.)

Knowing that Judy's customer profile is out there, the Ramones could create lead magnets that target her persona type, such as a new T-shirt that features their 1981 show at Cornell University. They wouldn’t likely get many soccer moms as leads, but that’s fine. They’ll have much more success when they target the right persona.

Knowing your customer personas will help you relate to your customers and thus understand how they interact with you, which is a critical part of scoring your interactions.

Want to know more about this Concept?

We have a great resource: "The Ultimate  Guide for Maximising the Value of Leads", that goes deep into developing your customer personas as part of an overall strategy for maximising your leads.

Only 23 per cent of sales professionals say marketers consistently deliver sales-ready leads.

(BtoB magazine, 2013 Lead Generation: Optimum Techniques for Managing Lead-Gen Campaigns, Nov 2013)

Lead scoring is a feature of marketing automation and Customer Relationship 
Management (CRM) software that enables you to have a more complete view of how your customers are interacting with you. Lead scoring will make you a rock star for your business (after all, rock stars know how to score).

Let’s be honest: We all want to be rock stars. Don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to flip a sweaty mop of hair out of your face as you tear up a guitar riff in front of 15,000 screaming fans, surrounded by amplifiers stacked up like skyscrapers. And just when you hit that perfectly timed power chord, the pyrotechnics blast sparks and smoke across the stage. 

OK, granted, there won’t be quite as many lasers, and skull-rattling drum solos might not accompany your biggest successes, but you can still kick a lot of ass at what you’re good at providing the best product or service you can offer to the people that need it and want it. Many business owners ask us about lead scoring because they’ve heard the hype about how it can help their business. They want to know how to get in on the action. There are lots of exciting stats on the Internet that can get businesses revved up. 

Here’s a crowd-pleaser:

63 per cent of companies that are outgrowing their competitors use marketing automation (a major component of which is lead scoring).

The Lenskold and Pedowitz Group “Lead Generation Marketing Effectiveness Study” (2013)

When you start to lead scoring, you can maximise your sales and marketing impact and free up your time by focusing on suitable leads.  It’s a simple concept: By scoring every one of your leads based on how they interact with your business, you can gauge just how ready they are to buy your products or services. You know they’re ready to talk sales when they hit a particular score. This way, whoever does your sales will always get the best leads. They won’t have to waste time with calls to people who aren’t ready to buy. When your lead scoring is dialed to eleven, your business rock and rolls. 

But here’s the deal: People don’t do well at lead scoring. Either your rock, you suck, or you’re just not doing it. 

Keep reading to find out how to be a lead-scoring rock star.

Now we’re finally ready to score our leads. The content on your map is out there, and people are interacting with it. Rock star companies are the ones that track precisely who’s interacting with their content, and they’re able to respond with a smarter sales approach.

High Fidelity

Lead scoring is worth all the effort you put into it because it gives you 360-degree insight into your customer interactions. This high fidelity level will set your business apart from the laggards.

The basic idea is that each interaction with your company has meaning, so you want to rate it with a score that values it. Then, as your leads interact with you, they add points to their score.

68 per cent of best-in-class

companies use lead scoring (a

marketing automation feature),

in comparison with 28 per cent

of laggard firms.

Aberdeen Group “State of Marketing Automation 2014: Processes that Produce” (2014)

In the HubSpot, these scores are translated to points. As their score goes up, more points show on their contact panels. When they hit a predetermined number of points, the salesperson gets notified via Automation, and they follow up. This ensures that your salespeople (or person) get only the hottest leads—like a rock star.

Turn back to your map. You’ve outlined how your personas interact with your marketing efforts; now, you must score.

You may have email campaigns, gated content downloads, website views, phone calls to your company, and social media interactions. Some interactions show more interest than others; your point system should reflect that.

How to score points

Every business uses its scoring system because every business is unique. If you’re unsure, a handy place to start is to make each rule worth twenty points of interaction to reach 100 points; the lead has to trigger five rules.

Think through the typical path that a lead takes and score it accordingly. If they require a lot of touches, you can rate your interactions in fives and tens. If the path is shorter, rate your interactions by twenty points or more—it’s your call. You want to be sure that you measure your leads' interest level to the best of your ability. You want to be sure you aren’t losing track of the hot leads or calling the cold ones who aren’t ready yet.

This lead is getting pretty hot. If there is any further interaction, they’ll be ready for a call from sales. Because marketing automation integrates into your online presence, the software can track user activity in various ways, giving you insight.

You can see:

• Activity on your website
• Web form completion
• Email opens
• Links clicked
• Subscriptions (email, blog)
• Email unsubscribes (negative points)
• Lead score decay (lack of interaction over time gives negative points)
• CRM tags (which is where the complex stuff happens)

Lead Score Card

Open my special offer email - 10 points

Fill out my web form - 25 points

Like my Facebook page - 5 points

Sign up for my newsletter - 20 points

Browse my website - 10 points

Download my whitepaper - 20 points

The more customer visibility you want, the more effort you must put into your lead-scoring setup. You need to find the sweet spot. How much effort can you put into lead scoring to get ROI? The more 360-degree visibility you achieve, the more targeted you can be.

It’s a little bit like riffing. It takes a bit of experimentation to write the perfect song. It's the same with lead scoring. You keep trying until you get it right. The beauty is that any visibility is valuable, and HubSpot is set up with a simple out-of-the-box lead scoring package that can give you some insight without putting a lot of effort in at the front end. Then again, if you want to rock the stage really hard, you can do that, too, using tags.

Track simple activity

If you want to add visibility to your leads as they interact with you, tracking simple activity is the fastest and easiest way. HubSpot can track these simple metrics right off the bat:

• Web form submission: Any time a web form is submitted, it scores that action; it doesn’t track specific web forms.

• Email opens: This tracks all emails generally; it doesn’t track specific emails.

• Click a link: Again; it tracks all link clicks equally; it doesn’t track specific links clicked.

• Email unsubscribe: Negative points will be automatically assigned.

If you choose to track simple activity, you will be able to see that people are interacting with your marketing efforts, and you can see interactions in a very general way.

This can add helpful visibility. We tell the business owners who ask us about lead scoring but have never done it before that this is a great way to get started. The fact that people are interacting with your marketing offers a level of visibility that you didn’t have if you weren’t lead scoring at all, and as you begin to build on the concept, you can get more sophisticated in your approach.

The upside to tracking simple metrics is that it’s the easiest way to lead score. The downside is that you can’t track specific activity, which is where you can know just how hot each specific lead is. To get that level of visibility, you have to use tags.

Tags (where it gets exciting)

Tags allow you to get very specific with your lead scoring. You can tag a customer in essentially an unlimited number of ways, which means you can derive as granular a picture of your leads as you want.

Here’s a pro tip: Tagging works best when you understand your business strongly.

Here’s the thing: We hear from a lot of small business owners, and many don’t know exactly how their business is working right now. If that applies to you, guess what? It’s OK.

You’ll figure it out. Remember that as you figure it out, you can perfect your strategy.

Tags are appended to each customer profile through automation or live interaction with their customer record. They can be appended in any number of ways:

• A tag can be based on demographics: Age, job title, favourite rock band, etc.

• A tag can be added when a lead fills out a specific web form (which means you can track multiple forms).

• Tags can be added when emails are opened.
• You can apply multiple tags for a single instance of interaction (web form completed, told you which instrument they play, etc.).

The way to work with tags is to focus on what you need to know—don’t get overzealous. Just because you can track nearly everything doesn’t mean you need to.

Lead score decay (hotness fades with age)

In most cases, we can infer that heavy interaction with our marketing indicates interest. Therefore, if that interaction slows down, it is logical to assume the lead is cooling off. So, in most cases, decay should trigger negative points.

Zeppelin rocks it eloquently: “It’s been a long time since I rock and rolled. It’s been a long time since I did the stroll.” If that describes your lead, they could be cooling off. If they’re cooling, you don’t want to send them to sales. You want to nurture them.

Maybe it’s time to email them to address their needs and remind them who you are.

Engagement with your brand is for you to work out. So you can use the decay functionality to your advantage. “Decay” sounds negative, but not always so. In some cases, it may be a trigger to start your next round of nurturing.

Consider our dentist friend: If their leads haven’t interacted with their brand for six months, it would be a great time to send them some marketing materials to get them thinking about their next visit. The decay is indicative of normal customer behaviour, and can be used to trigger intelligent campaigns.

At the end of the day, you have to make lead scoring points work for you. Be creative, and find those flamin’ hot customers! That’s how rock stars roll.

Measure and tweak

Then, of course, measure your success. Track your leads' interactions and identify how they journeyed through your funnel. Use the data to sharpen up your process. Is a particular marketing tactic converting higher than others?

Score it higher. Conversely, if a tactic isn’t providing the ROI you thought it would, drop it like it’s not hot.

The best way to approach lead scoring is to see it as a discovery process. It’s not as if you’re prescribing what it means to be a hot lead. Instead, you’re learning how to describe what it means to be a hot lead based on how leads interact with you.