Lead Scoring: A Comprehensive Guide
Lead scoring is a system that assigns points to a lead based on designated criteria and adds the points together to estimate the likelihood of that lead's readiness to make a purchase from you. It gives your company an objective system to rank and prioritize leads. In this comprehensive guide, we will cover everything you need to know about lead scoring, including what it is, how to define your ideal customer profile (ICP), the multiple ways you can apply lead scoring, and how it all ties back into the marketing funnel.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. What is Lead Scoring?
3. Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
4. Behavioral vs. Profile Lead Scoring
5. Multiple Score Sheets
6. How Lead Scoring Ties into the Marketing Funnel
7. Pros and Cons of Lead Scoring
8. Highlights
9. FAQ
Introduction
Lead scoring is a crucial aspect of any successful marketing strategy. It helps you prioritize leads, improve lead quality, and increase conversion rates. In this guide, we will cover everything you need to know about lead scoring, including how to define your ideal customer profile, the multiple ways you can apply lead scoring, and how it all ties back into the marketing funnel.
What is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring is a system that assigns points to a lead based on designated criteria and adds the points together to estimate the likelihood of that lead's readiness to make a purchase from you. It gives your company an objective system to rank and prioritize leads. Lead scoring is still possible and relevant in a B2C environment, but the approach we're taking and focusing on in this guide is going to be the B2B side of things.
Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Your ideal customer profile (ICP) combines firmographic, environmental, and behavioral characteristics to define your company's most desirable customer. Firmographic characteristics would be things like company size, number of employees, and industry. Environmental could include things like what types of technologies that organization uses, and behavioral ties back into engagement with your marketing materials.
To create an ICP, you want to start by identifying your best customers. Look at the customers you've already sold to, pull in info from your CRM, find upsells, find who's getting the most value from your product, and analyze the data. You want to look for patterns, look for similarities, and then create a template.
Behavioral vs. Profile Lead Scoring
Behavioral lead scoring assigns points based on the actions that a lead has taken and how they have engaged with your marketing material. This includes things like page visits, email clicks, form submits, webinar attendance, and more. Profile lead scoring considers other factors and characteristics such as job title, age, company location, and more.
You can have multiple score sheets to allow you to customize your scoring even further. You can expand upon your scoring rules, so coming back to the idea of profile versus behavior, you could have a score sheet for each. You could have a score sheet that calculates lead score in the last 90 days, lead score in the last week, lead score in all time, and more.
Multiple Score Sheets
In Act-On, you can have up to five score sheets by default, but you can add more if needed. Multiple score sheets give you an added dimension into comparing different lead scores. They allow you to really kind of further customize your scoring even further.
How Lead Scoring Ties into the Marketing Funnel
Lead scoring helps us quantify where people engage differently based on how interested they are in your product and how likely they are to buy from you. Based on the behaviors, they'll be assigned a certain number of points and they'll fall into these ranges that you've set. Again, the numbers are arbitrary at first, but they really mean something because you've decided at what point you'll take action.
Pros and Cons of Lead Scoring
Pros:
- Helps you prioritize leads
- Improves lead quality
- Increases conversion rates
- Gives your company an objective system to rank and prioritize leads
Cons:
- Can be time-consuming to set up
- Can be difficult to determine the right criteria to use
- Can be difficult to determine the right threshold for taking action
Highlights
- Lead scoring is a system that assigns points to a lead based on designated criteria and adds the points together to estimate the likelihood of that lead's readiness to make a purchase from you.
- Your ideal customer profile (ICP) combines firmographic, environmental, and behavioral characteristics to define your company's most desirable customer.
- Behavioral lead scoring assigns points based on the actions that a lead has taken and how they have engaged with your marketing material.
- Profile lead scoring considers other factors and characteristics such as job title, age, company location, and more.
- Multiple score sheets give you an added dimension into comparing different lead scores.
FAQ
Q: How many score sheets can you create in Act-On?
A: By default, you can have up to five score sheets in Act-On, but you can add more if needed.
Q: How do you handle email series that triggers when you add ICP scoring?
A: This is a case-by-case basis, and it really depends on your specific situation.
Q: What is the difference between a buyer persona and an ICP?
A: A buyer persona looks more at the characteristics of the person, while an ICP focuses more on the traits of an organization.
Q: What are the pros and cons of lead scoring?
A: Pros include helping you prioritize leads, improving lead quality, increasing conversion rates, and giving your company an objective system to rank and prioritize leads. Cons include being time-consuming to set up, difficult to determine the right criteria to use, and difficult to determine the right threshold for taking action.
