Developing an Effective Lead Scoring Model: 4 Tips

When it comes to lead scoring, building it in your Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) is the easy part. The really challenging part of lead scoring is defining your scoring model. Here are four tips to help you get started:

1. Identify the characteristics that make a good lead.
   What are the demographic/firmographic characteristics that are important? Job title? Revenue? Industry? You can get pretty sophisticated here and use different tiers – maybe you have one industry that is an extremely good fit, so you assign one score value to a lead in that industry. A second good, but not as good industry value could be worth fewer points.
   
2. Identify the behaviors that make a good lead.
   What behaviors indicate purchasing intent? (Spoiler: just because someone has opened your email does not mean they want to buy what you are selling.) Web activity, email engagement, webinar attendance, tradeshow engagement; these are all examples of activities that, when looked at holistically, may paint a picture of someone who is ready to buy. Work with your sales team to identify the most relevant activities and give those the highest score value.
   
3. If you’re scoring web visits, analyze how you apply those scores.
   Not all webpages are created equal. A pricing page is probably more indicative of someone interested in buying than your home page is. Identify some key pages that are worth more and identify any pages that you may want to exclude from scoring (careers page, for example).
   
4. Don’t be afraid to iterate.
   Once you get your scoring set up, monitor it closely. Is it performing how you expected? Are the leads you are calling ‘Qualified’ going on to close deals? Is sales satisfied with the quantity and quality of leads you are sharing? It may take some tweaks to get to a point where you are really happy with your model.

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