Tips for Developing a High-Performing Lead Score System

Lead Scoring is a methodology used by sales and marketing departments to determine the worthiness of leads, or potential customers, by attaching values to them based on their behaviour relating to their interest in products or services. The “value” of each lead varies from company to company, but generally is characterised by the interest shown in the company or their places in the buying cycle. 

It is one of those things that, in theory, sounds really technical and sophisticated.

Today, we’ll discuss some tips to help create a lead scoring strategy that feels organic, easy to manage, and can help your sales team trace back a prospect’s story leading up to MQL/SQL status.

Separate your direct MQL/SQL qualifiers into lists

Any criteria that directly qualifies someone for MQL/SQL statuses should go into a designated list. This way, we can leverage workflows and emails to automate things like a contact’s lifecycle stage changing to MQL, reps being notified that their lead just hit this status, and anything else you want to respond with to someone’s new status in your database. By creating a process centered on clean data, efficient communication, and less work— you can’t go wrong. 

With this in place, we can reliably generate MQLs based on big ticket items like contact forms, while we use lead scoring to start qualifying everyone else who is engaging in smaller ways over time.   

Keep your score ranges small

A lead scoring model shouldn’t have anything worth an exorbitant amount of points for the purpose of directly qualifying. We’ll be working with smaller ranges whose lower, middle, and upper limits allow for easy interpretation. Example: A scale of 1-5 may be more appropriate, since there’s a clear line between not-so-good (1-2), okay (3), and great (4-5)! 

Having a smaller scale makes it easy to identify what makes a good action different than a great one, and helps us work smarter

Assign your entire score range to different iterations of the action

Your lead scoring model should allow your contact to reach certain milestones no matter what combination of smaller actions they take, especially taking into account frequency or quantity of these actions. A contact that has opened 10 emails and visited your page 10 times should be prioritized just as much as a contact who has downloaded 2 white papers, if you find that the conversation is the same.

Segment your maximum range into 3 parts

Divide your range into parts that represent what meeting a certain score means for the contact’s status in the database. lead score ranges into 3 parts: “Leads in need of nurturing,” “Engaged Leads,” and “Lead Score MQLs.”

Using this example with a max range of 45, we’ll set our “Leads in need of nurturing” cutoff at 10 points. Anything above that will belong in our “Engaged Leads” list from scores 11-35, and our “Lead Score MQL” list will contain contacts with scores 36-45.

Labeling a contact as a new/nurturing leads lets us know, based on their low score, that we could stand to send a few more emails, offers, etc. For these contacts, consider adding them into a blog subscription list if you have an active blog, or something with some top of the funnel content offers, along with some purely educational material. 

Labeling a contact as “engaged” means that they’ve reached a certain threshold of interacting with your content where it makes sense to start getting a bit more personal with offers, e.g. webinars, event invites, and more advanced conversion offers make sense for this contact. 

Labeling a contact as “Marketing Qualified” means, through a series of interactions with marketing collateral, your client has indicated enough of an interest in your company where it makes sense for a sales rep to reach out.

These are some of the ideas that will you to create all sorts of workflows, internal notifications, and nurturing processes.

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