Want to know if lead scoring is working? Do these 3 things.

How do you know if lead scoring is working for your organization?

As B2B marketers, it’s important to generate revenue. Gone are the days where it’s all about sessions and website, website traffic, and number of leads. It’s really about what are the leads that are driving the opportunities and the revenue within the organization? And if you can’t answer that question, you’re in trouble.

To help identify the leads driving revenue, lead scoring is often identified as a solution. Lead scoring is implemented, and then (unfortunately), the organization moves on. Very rarely is the question asked, “is this really working?” In fact, typically it’s a year or two after lead scoring implementation when someone finally asks if lead scoring is working, and frankly, that’s not useful.

It’s actually critical to evaluate the effectiveness of your lead scoring in the first three to six months.  Doing it at this time, helps you to make tweaks early for lasting impact.

So, how do you know if the lead scoring is working? What do you look for in those first three to six months after implementation? We looked to Nadia Milani, VP of Marketing at Proposify for her perspective.  

1. Look at funnel conversions – stage by stage

“It’s about really understanding at each stage, how is my funnel performing? What is the percentage of leads converting at each stage? What is the quality of those conversions? And when you find gaps, for example if your leads aren’t making it past SAL, then it’s really important to work to understand how to fix that. How do we move those leads across the lifecycle?”

When it’s not working, you’re not creating the opportunities, you’re not generating enough pipeline and so you’re not creating the revenue impact required for the business. If you’re not achieving that, you must go back and ask yourself 2 questions:

1. Does every single lead have a score?
2. What percentage of MQLs become SALs?

Since Marketing and Sales must work together to make lead scoring work, we were also interested in the Sales perspective.  To get that, we reached out to Jody Johnson, CEO at Prospect Hunter and asked him how he evaluates whether lead scoring is working or not?

2. Review historical information for trends

“The first thing to do is to look at the historical information you have available. As you’re reviewing that data, look for trends. For example, if you’ve got low scored leads converting in your pipeline, you probably need to make some adjustments.

If you’ve got an equal balance of low scored and high scored leads closing in your pipeline, then your lead scoring is really not doing its part. You should be seeing your high scored leads being the ones that are converting and maybe a handful of low scored leads. If this is the case, then your lead scoring process is really working for you.”

3. Get buy-in from Sales

Ultimately though, it’s about revenue. Where is the revenue coming from? And where are the deals coming from? Salespeople want to make their job easier, and lead scoring can be a solution, but sometimes it’s hard for Marketing to get Sales buy-in, because lead scoring is a process.

To get Sales buy-in, Jody emphasizes that Marketing and Sales must work together. “If you want me to buy-in, but I’m closing deals that are low scoring, then help me understand that. Otherwise, I’m going to start to think that I can’t depend on the data that I’m getting. But, once we both sit down and figure out why it’s happening and we make adjustments and we start to see high scoring leads converting, then I can get really excited because then, when I see a lead that comes in with a high score, I know the probability is higher to close it.”

Want to dive deeper into lead scoring?

Check out our live forum ‘Signals in Lead Scoring’ recording to hear more discussion from B2B Sales and Marketing leaders.

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