3 tips to manage complex lead scoring programs

Managing complex lead scoring systems can feel overwhelming

For large enterprise businesses, lead scoring can become a giant monstrosity. You have to deal with scoring on different types of products, or different lines of businesses.

The point of a lead score is to be able to surface up really good quality leads, but the definition of a really good quality lead may be different depending on the line of business or the product that you’re dealing with.

There’s no question, it’s complex. So how do you manage these complex lead scoring frameworks? On top of that, how do you manage the expectations on the Sales side? And, how do you manage it on your platforms?

During our Signals in Lead Scoring live forum, this question came up. So we looked to our guest speaker Nadia Milani, VP of Marketing at Proposify and Zee Jeremic, forum host and our CEO, for some perspective. They offered the following three tips:

1. Keep it simple

Nadia Milani, who has worked across many different verticals, including ecommerce, SAS, tech and more, believes that simplicity is the key.

“I recognize simplicity can be hard, because in certain industries, it does require some complexity. But I found that where we created complexity, it really degraded the ability to create the leads, and the opportunities that were required for the business. And when we really scaled down the lead scoring opportunity, or the lead scoring models, it was really helpful and beneficial for the organization.”

2. Leverage great software

How do you scale down your lead scoring complexity? Look at software. As Nadia says: “there’s a lot of really great software that’s come up in the last five years that helps with more intent based data. For example, Clearbit has been a lifesaver to determine if the leads we’re generating are real. It helped us to identify intent based behaviors, including has a prospect attended a webinar? Have they downloaded an ebook?”

3. Understand who is buying

In addition to simplicity and software, you must also look at demographics. Zee Jeremic added that in his experience “it actually doesn’t matter whether you have a single division, a single product, or you’re a large enterprise, with dozens of divisions, or hundreds of products. Ultimately you have to be looking for who is buying. You’re looking for that customer profile, by division by product or by line of product. And that’s what you’re trying to create the score for. You create the score to prioritize, and essentially, that score will prioritize the leads for that division, or that product line, and then you will send over those prioritized leads to sales.”

Looking for a deeper dive into lead scoring?

Have a listen to the full recording of Signals in lead scoring to hear about what actions should hold a higher value in scoring, how to know if lead scoring is working and more.