Lead Scoring Guide for Modern Marketers

Lead scoring is a methodology to make the life easier for the marketing and sales teams while they are following up leads to turn them into customers with huge communication lists.

Lead scoring helps marketing and sales teams to identify leads’ buying potentials by analyzing the leads’ profile attributes such as job title, industry, gender etc. with a combination of the leads’ engagement level such as website visit frequency, responsiveness to promotions and other online behaviors of the lead.

To be able to create a efficient Lead Scoring model, at first marketing and sales teams should have a clear defination of a good lead and then Lead Scoring model can be developed to send the good leads to the sales team for taking the necessary actions or turn a poor lead into a better one.

How to Create a Lead Scoring Model

Effective lead scoring combines prospect demographic and behavioral data to prioritize leads. Two of the most commonly used scoring dimensions are:

Prospect Identity: Who the prospect is, signified by explicit data that determines fit, such as title, industry, and company revenues.

Prospect Engagement: How interested the prospect is, indicated by implicit data that determines level of engagement, such as frequent visits to website and responsiveness to promotions.

Prospect Identity

To define the prospect identity part of the lead score you must:

• Determine four to five explicit-data categories to define a sales-ready stage of qualification.
• Define how important these categories are in relationship to one another by assigning a percentage ranking. All percentages should total 100%.
• Assign a tiered set of corresponding criteria values within each category.

Prospect Engagement

To determine the engagement score, follow these steps:

• Determine the implicit data categories to define a sales-ready stage of qualification.
• Define how important these categories are in relationship to one another.
• Assign values by weighting actions based on recency.
• Assign a value from 1-4, with 1 being the most engaged, to indicate how much a lead meets the ranked engagement criteria.

Once Oracle Eloqua evaluates a lead against the profile and engagement criteria, it combines the profile score and the engagement score and assigns the lead a lead score. A1 is the most qualified lead and a D4 is the least qualified.

Mapping lead scores to action

After defining a lead scoring model, you can map lead scores to the appropriate follow-up action. For example, map the scores that you want to send to your CRM system or to a nurturing program.

According to Aberdeen Research, companies that get lead scoring right have a 192% higher average lead qualification rate than those that do not

Lead Scoring System Benefits

• Measures campaign effectiveness
• Decreases volume of salesready leads
• Aligns follow-up resources for optimal conversion to revenue
• Objectively assess the potential worth of new opportunities