Break down the points based on ICP
An ideal customer profile (ICP) defines the demographic and behavioural attributes of accounts expected to become a company’s most valuable customers. For lead scoring, this includes fixed factors such as:
- Title
- Industry
- Size of the business
- Individual’s seniority
- Location of company.
And behavioural factors such as:
- Email click-through rate
- Downloading content
- Attending webinars/events.
Matt-Antos Lewis, EMEA marketing lead at Verkada, says: “Your starting point is going to be based on what you believe your company’s ICP is, but a lead scoring matrix should always be your living, breathing document. I think a common mistake some people make is to picture who they want and sort of try to fix their lead scoring to that specific threshold rather than necessarily reflecting reality.”
Typically, businesses use a 1-100 scoring system (although some vary), where 50 is the threshold score where sales will reach out. When it comes to assigning points to every action, Matt advises marketers to really focus on those fixed factors.
“Engagement is also important, but you could still sell to someone who is the right type of person who perhaps hasn’t engaged with you enough to trigger the lead score threshold. However, you might not sell to someone just because they’ve downloaded all your whitepapers or webinars, so I would say the scores related to who they are more important than what they’re doing.”
Include sales in the mix
When it comes to the scoring system you’re using, Matt says the numbers being used is rather unimportant in comparison to catering it more so to your specific business.
“What’s key is that sales and marketing agree on a threshold – it’s important not to leave it too late so that you miss out on people who could have been sold to if you’re too slow, but, on the other hand, if you go in too quick before prospects are ready, sales starts to lose faith in the scoring. It’s got to be high enough – the higher the number, the more granular you can be and the more you can play with it.”
For advice on how to set scores up, get sales into the mix and include them at every step of the lead scoring process – after all, lead scoring is to their benefit.
Long gone are the days when sales got instant leads from in-person events, so it’s critical that the relationship between sales and marketing be nurtured. Your ICP and feedback from sales will help you determine what lead scoring attributes you should be focusing on.
Matt says: “Marketing is building and owning that space, but it should also be based on the input of sales on the actual results.”
This is when you can also start having discussions once lead scoring is being utilised more often.
Constantly evaluate your system
When you first set up your lead scoring system, you’re going to have to set it up on an educated guess of what certain behaviours mean – and that’s okay at first. However, once you start to gain some insights, you’ll need to be prepared to tweak the process if possible.
Matt advises: “One thing that might be key to consider is perhaps not allowing people to hit that number through just one type of activity, or perhaps a repeat of the same activity gets you progressively fewer points.”
That means if someone is downloading three whitepapers, it might be more meaningful to look at someone who downloads a whitepaper and attends a webinar. This is where you’ll need to ask sales if they’ve seen any noticeable patterns.
Just like there are factors that can make your score go up, perhaps there are factors that should be considered once someone disengages. For example, marketers will sometimes include a lead score decay over time.
Lead score decay represents the amount of time it should take for a lead to be half as important as it used to be. You’ll want to recognise that recent activity and lots of activity repeated over a certain period of time is far more valuable than someone who has been touching base in a lightweight way over an extended period of time.
Matt explains: “Maybe you get 50 points for a webinar and 50 points for an eBook download. If I’m flirting with a company for eight years, I could’ve amassed thousands of points without ever really being in a position to buy. If I attend a webinar once a year in January and download an eBook once a year in September, over a number of years, I’m going to be building a lot of points, but it doesn’t really give you valuable insight and according to the matrix. Then all of the sudden, I’ve got the same score as someone who’s attended six webinars in six weeks.”
Focus on the quality not the quantity of MQLs
Your company might give you a target. Make X number of leads in this timeframe, but the underlying issue here is that it prevents marketing from passing over valuable and quality leads. Your goal is not to get the most leads, it’s to get the best leads.
Matt says: “So my piece of advice is to constantly be reviewing it, but do so with an open and honest mindset with the understanding that the outcome is to get the right leads at the right time, rather than just getting the most MQLs.”
You mustn’t get leads for the sake of the business. That defeats the purpose of lead scoring, so be honest with yourself before doing a handover. Is a lead really sales ready? The goal isn’t to get more MQLs because that’s just a false metric.
At a previous company Matt worked with, their team had a lot of anecdotal evidence coming back from sales, where people would go onto the website and request a demo which received a certain amount of points and, at the time, they were receiving a tonne of MQLs. However, the feedback was that people were requesting demos because they thought they would be able to plug and play with a sandbox version of the product. What they were actually getting was a phone call from sales offering a demo over Zoom and they weren’t necessarily at that stage yet.
Matt says: “It wasn’t really an MQL, so we needed to change the wording and say what you’re actually getting is a request from sales. But then someone said ‘Well, if we do that, we’ll get fewer MQLs’, but we had a debate and realised that the MQLs we were getting weren’t real at the end of the day. What it’s about is getting good quality.”
