Best Practices to Set up a Lead Scoring Model to Improve Lead Quality

The key concept of the lead scoring system is to build a clear understanding between the marketing and the sales teams based on specific parameters. Build a scoring model to define your quality of leads, the interactions, and follow-ups by subscribers, the levels of collaboration between marketing and sales teams, and many other related factors. 

If the lead scoring model is built by collaborating with sales and marketing teams, companies can set more relevant rules which will actually define the kinds of leads and lead quality to determine which and when the leads are sales-ready. Thus, you can build a lead scoring system for qualifying leads that will help you prepare a list of leads which are based on prospects’ interests and greater possibilities of conversions. After you have set the rules for prioritizing leads, you can determine the leads which need to be transferred to the sales funnel and which leads require more nurturing.

How To Build a Lead Scoring Strategy?

To build an effective lead scoring strategy, you can start with defining the three most critical factors that are prospects who are interested in your offers, marketing process and content, and the marketing channels. When it comes to defining and setting rules for score, your sales and marketing teams need to collaborate and come up with the ground rules that can best define qualified leads as well as the best time to transfer to the sales team. The main purpose of building your lead scoring system should be generating leads that are sales-ready and can be transferred to the sales team for further qualification and follow-up. 

Best Practices To Build a Lead Scoring Strategy

Many marketers have reported that too many criteria make the process a bit too complicated. They often get lost in defining which criteria are to choose and set to define the score. To avoid dilemma or confusion, you need to collaborate with your sales and marketing teams to set the criteria that can define both marketing-qualified and sales-qualified leads for the business. Following are the dos and don’ts of building an effective lead scoring strategy.  

Create Documentation 

First of all, you need to build clear documentation of all the steps of lead activities right from the beginning and through the process of lead nurturing till the point when the leads are shared with the sales team. After the handover, your marketing team needs to analyze the impact of lead scoring on compensation. The documentation can aid in finding your lead scoring rules in Marketo. Create a thorough lead scoring document and then link the document to the smart campaigns that are associated with all the rules. Also, test the lead scoring score thresholds in the schematic before you start creating the lead scoring model. Make sure the score which converts a lead into a marketing qualified lead should be the ideal prospect.

Create a Lead Scoring Folder 

In addition to the documentation, create a behavioral folder for all the behavioral rules you set and a demographic folder for all the demographic rules set to the lead scoring program. You can also mix behavioral rules and demographic rules to score your leads. These folders which contain combined rules should be named “advanced scoring rules.”

Maintain Standard Set of Forms 

Marketers love creating new forms, even when they have the same fields. As your team continues updating the lead scoring model with newly created forms, the more complicated the scoring becomes. Additionally, it also leads to a data consistency issue since certain fields are added to new forms, such as those hidden fields. We recommend marketers creating a standard set of forms for every type of call-to-action such as a standard form for a whitepaper download, a standard form for webinar registration, a different form for a requesting product demo and other forms.

Create Specific Fields for Different Behavioral Scores

We recommend creating a separate demographic score, behavioral score, as well as a combined score. Having different sets of scores can help you track those values separately. Later, as you reset scores based on behavior or inactivity, you can still keep the demographic score data intact. 

Consider Closed Won Opportunities to Spot Trends

If you have already built a customer base, then you can perform a thorough analysis of your existing customer database to define trends in various customer segments. Look for those noticeable trends such as job title, functions, team size, number of employees, industry, location, annual revenue, and many other similar parameters. Based on these insights, you can further improve better lead scoring builds based on demographic scoring to locate ideal customer profiles.

Use a Data Append Tool 

If all your customers have generated a total annual revenue of more than $1B in your customer database, you can use it as a great lead scoring indicator to mark new leads with that specific criteria. The challenge is that most prospects do not furnish the actual value in their form submissions, or maybe they do not know the actual figures. You can use tools like ReachForce to get accurate data on demographic information and also, help improve form submissions by reducing the number of fields in a form. 

Do Not Consider Program Progression 

We strictly recommend to marketers not to score leads based on program progressions. Instead, they can consider changes in campaign status that are prominent indicators of customer engagement. You need to make sure that you have synced your lead score values to the CRM system, such as Salesforce. So that the CRM can carry that lead scores from leads to contact objects for reference. Remember that your lead scoring needs to align with the workflow rules for passing moving leads throughout every lead status.

Lead Status Should Update Lead Scoring Values

If you have built a disqualified and not valid lead status, then you need to set the lead score to zero (0). If a lead is sent back to the marketing for more nurturing, then set the behavioral scores for those leads to zero (0) and let the engagement start with the nurturing process to rescore those leads. To create reporting that shows the number of leads that were returned to marketing and that are requalified, consider placing or marking those leads as REMQL. 

Conclusion

Finally, do not set rules and forget to improvise rules. Your marketing team needs to continuously work with the sales team to measure the lead quality. Did you find these lead scoring rules and strategies effective to work for your business? You can directly talk to us to discuss your lead scoring challenges and problems to get those done right by our certified marketing operations experts. For that, use the chat box at the right below or drop us a “Hi” at experts@marrinadecisions.com. If you are active on social now, then you can simply DM us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter – if you want!