An easy guide to B2B Lead Scoring and Lead Progression for Marketing Automation

Lead Scoring is one of the main pillars of Marketing Automation, but after a few years working in Lead Nurture and Marketing Automation programs I’ve got to the conclusion that scoring is always a long run. There are so many factors that need to be considered when setting up a lead scoring model and it will take you several rounds of fine-tuning until you find the right balance for each metric and the right score threshold for active buyers in the lead lifecycle.

But, why lead scoring is so important to better qualify your leads?

The following are my top reasons why you should set up a comprehensive scoring model if you already have a Marketing Automation System (MAS):

1. It will help you identify the right amount of engagement a lead requires to show that is active in the buying cycle.
2. It will help you report what are the main tactics (e.g. webinars) or content pieces (e.g. case study) that turn leads into marketing qualified leads (attribution). This will allow you to give different value to different activities or content pieces (best practice if you are already into Content Marketing).
3. It will make your Inside Sales activity much more efficient as they would only follow-up leads that are ready to talk, about your solutions or products, as they have shown interest in specific content.

So, where do you start? What are the activities you should score on?

If you are just starting with Lead Scoring, some MAS provide good scoring templates to start with, but normally I would recommend to review your current marketing activities and decide what are the main behavioural actions that you believe are the indicators of engagement and therefore need to be included. Below is a standard scoring model that includes the most commonly used marketing tactics:

Behavioural Scoring

• Emails: Open, clicks, shares or forward to a friend are common metrics for emails. You would have different scores for opens (e.g. +2 or +5) or clicks (e.g. +8 or +10).  It’s recommended to differentiate between your call-to-actions, for example, you would score higher specific content (valuable content such as case studies, white papers or on-demand webinars) and keep lower the score for others like news, blogs or soft call-to-actions.
• Website: Visits, visit duration, visit to specific pages (e.g. solutions or products), number of visits a day, number of total visits, fills a form (e.g contact us) between others are the most commonly used for web. Same applies to web activity, you would like to give different scores depending on the value/weight of the content or the call-to-action. For example, you can score higher when visiting a solution page or clicking to download or watch a video case study. Also, you could apply negative score when visiting undesirable pages such as career opportunities or job sections.
• Events: Registered (+10), attended (+15), downloaded resources or simply filled a ‘register your interest’ form are some of the most common metrics around events. When a lead engages with an online event (e.g webinar or an online demo) is enough evidence that they are in a mid-stage of the buying cycle, and they are already looking for specific solutions (consideration stage). It’s recommended that you have your lead lifecycle set up accordingly to move leads through the funnel. (I wrote another blog post on how to set up your Lead Lifecycle). You can also apply scoring to offline events, such as roadshows, trade-shows, branded events, conferences, as soon as you are capturing the required data in your CRM or MAS (e.g. attended or registered)
• Search queries and SEM: It depends on how much SEO or SEM you do would determine to have specific scoring around some keywords (from search engines) and also source of the traffic. For example you could score visitors that have typed/searched specific keywords (as a solution name or specific product name) or visitors that have come from an specific advertising campaign (e.g. Google Adwords).
• Social media activity: Some MAS (e.g Marketo Social Marketing) have the ability to score on social shares, likes and more advanced third-party tools (like Wildfire App) will allow you to monitor and listen some keywords or advanced behaviour within social networks. Even more, MAS like Marketo are integrating these tools to provide ‘predictive analytics‘ and help marketers identify future influencers or buyers depending on certain actions or social behaviours (e.g. using specific hash tags within their social shares).

Demographic & Firmographic Scoring

There will be certain parameters that define your ICP (ideal customer profile). You can use scoring to better qualify these ICPs within your audience and prioritise them accordingly. Some of the examples below are common for Demographic/Firmographic scoring metrics:

• Company size: Size of the company by number of employees (e.g >500 employees)
• Role or job title: Which job roles are decision makers within the company? (e.g. IT Manager, CEO, Business Owner)
• Industry: Are there any specific industry that your solution is more suitable for?
• Location: Country or States that might be more relevant to your current solutions or products
• Work number: They have a valid work phone number (with 8 digits)
• Others relevant CRM fields: There are many relevant CRM fields that you could utilise to identify your ICP such as purchase history, gender, age, annual revenue etc

Score Decay & Negative Scoring

Another good practice is to use score decay to score in a negative way certain actions or demographic attributes that you believe should be taken into consideration to exclude any lead that doesn’t match the MQL criteria.

Some examples of negative scoring are:

• Invalid phone numbers
• Invalid or fake names
• Invalid or incomplete email addresses
• No activity in a certain period of time (e.g. 3-6 months of inactivity)
• Visited undesirable web pages (e.g. career or opportunities pages)
• Competitors or business partners

If you believe this article is being helpful and you would like to get started with your lead scoring model, contact me or have a read to any the following resources:

Best Practice: lead scoring (Eloqua)

The Definite Guide to Lead Scoring (Marketo)

Scoring Best Practices (Pardot)

Please share the knowledge!