These are the 5 questions you should answer to improve your lead scoring

If you are looking to improve your existing lead scoring, or maybe even considering whether lead scoring is going to be relevant for you, read on.

We are sharing a lead scoring dashboard that quickly outlines 5 critical things you should be looking at and thinking about when it comes to lead scoring. Scroll to the bottom to download this 1 page resource.

Question 1 | Does every single lead have a score?

The very first thing to determine is whether or not you are scoring every single lead. This is actually really simple, yet most organizations don’t do it. There is a common assumption that once lead scoring is deployed, everything is automatically being scored. But that’s not always the case. Determining if your organization is scoring all leads or just some is a good kind of litmus test for whether your scoring is actually working at a very basic layer.

Question 2 | Is my lead scoring working?

This is all about conversion. You want to look at the conversion ratios between stages. First, start with your highly scored MQLs and determine if they’re converting into SALs. If yes, that means the sales rep looked at them and said, ‘I want to call this person’. This is an important lead scoring signal and another litmus test for whether your lead scoring is working. If marketing is sending over MQLs but no one is looking at them, or sales reps are discarding them, that’s another signal that something is probably wrong.

Question 3 | What reports should I generate?

Reports are a critical part of developing a lead scoring system that converts. Having data that both marketing and sales can reference moves the conversation away from “I think” or “I feel” to “I know” or “the data tells us”. This is critical. There are 3 key reports to generate.

First, a funnel stage conversion report so that both teams can understand how many leads are really making it through each stage.

Second is a data completeness report.  This report should show the completeness of your most important criteria, like name, title, email address etc. Marketers know that how complete your prospect profile is provides important lead scoring signals. It moves beyond what content they downloaded and rounds things out with titles and company size, which, when considered as a whole, can be validated to confirm fit. Most of the time when scoring is low, it’s because we don’t have the data.  If your data completeness isn’t where you want it to be, look to improve it with progressive profiling, or with services like Demandbase and ZoomInfo. 

The last report is all about insights and patterns. Whether you’re currently deploying lead scoring, or if you’re thinking about deploying it, looking at insights and patterns is a critical signal you can use to make improvements.  After all, when you first set up lead scoring, you’ll be doing it on a combo of data and hunches.  Over time, you want to be looking for patterns of acceptance and rejection. You will start to see patterns you never thought about. For example:

• 100% of webinar attendees sent to sales, but 90% of them are rejected
• Most SALs actually have a particular title

Once you start to see those patterns, you can start to make easy tweaks. For example, perhaps webinar attendance alone isn’t enough to qualify someone.

Question 4 | How often should I review my lead scoring?

In the first quarter after you deploy lead scoring, you want to review the rejects and accepts weekly and make adjustments monthly. Of course, this timing is based on Sales agreeing to follow up on every lead. If this isn’t happening, then there’s actually dubious value in doing this.

After 3 months, you should be seeing an improvement in conversion rates, so then you can downscale to reviewing monthly and adjusting quarterly. A good rule of thumb to remember is this: If week over week tweaks are resulting in ~5% improvements, and you’re seeing a slow down in improvements, that’s likely an indication you’ve achieved most of your gain.

Question 5 | How much time should lead scoring take?

This is a common question, but it actually doesn’t really take that much time. At MASS, we do this quite often for our clients when we deploy lead scoring, and 15 to 30 minutes per week is all it takes. Quickly scan through leads that were sent, how many were accepted, and how many
rejected.

If you need to make adjustments, usually the adjustments will be minor, about 60 or 120 minutes per week. These days, most scoring is done in marketing automation platforms like Pardot, Marketo, Eloqua, Hubspot. So typically all you’re doing is tweaking dials. If something’s not quite where you want it to be, you can usually adjust the dial based on the criteria and the patterns that you’re seeing. And you keep this up next week and next month, and you look to improve it over time, because it’s never perfect in the beginning.

Generate more leads that convert

Download our 1 page lead scoring dashboard to help your sales and marketing team align to drive more revenue.

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