Most B2B Businesses regardless of niche or industry think of setting up their inbound program as the north star indicator of marketing success. However, marketing success transcends beyond just a successful inbound program focused on demand generation. Often, that’s only part of the puzzle. The real refinement of lead generation and customer acquisition for revenue focused teams comes down to how those leads/prospects move through your marketing funnels and lengthy sales cycles.
Here at Measure Marketing, we’ve realized that funnel journeys for leads will be nuanced and the complexity of it will depend on the business’ product, service and/or lead qualification stages. The point is, when we invite leads into our marketing ecosystem, we must assign them characteristics that give us more information about their wants and needs.
This process, known as lead scoring, acts as a bridge for effective communication between marketing and sales teams when navigating between great and not-so great opportunities within the broader CRM software. Ultimately, this gives sales teams the added insight into the quest to win the best customers and increase revenue.
For this article, we’ll reference HubSpot as our preferred CRM of choice but recognize that there is a broad spectrum of solutions out there that will work just the same.
How does lead scoring work?
When a record enters the CRM through various marketing touchpoints it brings along with it various sets of data. This could be personal identification information (PII), 1st party data or 3rd party data.
When that information is captured by the CRM, the created record will be scored on a points scale, against the captured data and help qualify the record if the criteria is met.
HubSpot Makes this process easy through a set of pre-determined ‘contact properties’ teams have access to as shown below. This set up can also be replicated if firmographic data is more important. Firmographic attributes can be found under ‘company properties’.
The same feature in HubSpot allows you to add negative traits as well for added scoring accuracy.
Let’s take an example and apply it to the explanation above.
A B2B SaaS Company wanting to collect demo requests prefers working with companies above the revenue range of $5-10 million dollars might want to assign a high number of points to that prospect when compared to an inbound prospect at a revenue range of $1-2 Million. In a table, this identification may look something like this:
For this B2B SaaS Company, it’s clear that getting clients in the $5-20M revenue ranges are preferred, with 10 points being ideal and the maximum number of points available for the ‘revenue range’ attribute.
While this may be a deep look at a single attribute, lead scoring should consider all north star attributes that fall under their Ideal Customer Profile when looking to score their leads and prospects.
If sales teams can convert high scored leads in the $5-20M revenue ranges at an accelerated pace than those in lower ranges, the B2B company in question will be on the fast track to increasing its annual recurring revenue (ARR).
The 5 Critical Considerations for a Winning Lead Scoring Strategy
We believe there are 5 critical activities for B2B businesses to consider when executing a successful lead scoring strategy.
1. Quantifying your Ideal Customer Profile
There are many ways to quantify your ICP but in the context of lead scoring looking at certain firmographic and behavioral based attributes might be the right place to start. Using a B2B SaaS Company as an example we can identify a total of five positive attributes and a negative attribute they might look to access their leads on, shown in the lead scoring model below:
Based on the model above, we can draw some conclusions. This company may find prospects who engage with their content while being part of their niche industry are the most important segment they want to close for sales with.
Of course, this model also seeks to justify a prospect’s revenue. Considering a cumulative perfect weighted score of 55, this B2B SaaS Company may only attribute 18% of their ICP to be focused on its revenue.
Note: Your weighted scores can change based on your ICP attributes and points system. We recommend scoring each attribute on a 10-point system because of the added accuracy and flexibility the grading window numbers brings.
2. Benchmarking Existing Customer Data Against Your ICP Lead Score Criteria
One way to inform your Lead Scoring Strategy is looking at existing customer data and applying the ICP attributes to it. Measure your current customers against your best ICP attributes and see how they fare.
You may realize that certain customers are not engaged in the product or service putting them at a higher risk to churn.
Conversely, you may find the opposite. Some customers may be the exact ICP and engage with your business monthly. These folks may be open to upsell opportunities or could be an excellent source of referral business, another common metric that companies score is a Net Promoter Score. The weighted average of a positive NPS on your lead scoring strategy can give great insights to sales teams.
HubSpot empowers your sales team to look at customer attributes by navigating to contacts and filtering by ‘Lead Status’ set to ‘Customer’. And then applying an ‘advanced filter’ for ICP scored attributes.
3. Assigning negative attributes to the scoring model
Knowing when leads go sour is just as important as knowing when they are ripe. In our example scoring model, we showed how a B2B SaaS company might consider no activity for 30 days as something that would reduce a lead’s score by 5 points. As such we can define a few other negative attributes, for example:
- Revenue below targeted amount
- Cold Email Bounces
- Email Campaign Unsubscribes
- Contact Job Title miss alignment.
- Full 30, 60, 90-day activity decay with incremental reduction in points, respectively
All these factors can give context to prospect conversion rate from MQL to SQL and how they move through the full pipeline. Positive target criteria must be balanced with negative criteria as well.
4. Automating sales activity based on scoring
CRM tools give us the freedom to engage with leads and prospects in unique ways. A common method for leveraging HubSpot lead scoring is to utilize workflows to connect BDR’s with the right MQL. This example shows if the Lead Score is 50 or greater, the record gets assigned to Namay.
Commonly this method works great for mid-sized and enterprise level organizations where BDR’s can be assigned leads based on their product expertise and historical performance with closing deals where the lead score is 50 and above.
This example is one which can directly influence bottom of pipeline conversion metrics like SQL to Win conversion rates by associating the most qualified BDRs to communicate the customer/product fit to hot prospects.
5. Continuously evolving lead scoring models
Scoring criteria is not a one-and-done job. Infact, marketing and sales teams should re-evaluate the model and scoring quarter-over-quarter (QoQ). A business’s ICP will stay the same or rarely shift, but the efficacy of marketing campaigns will always fluctuate. New channels will be added and tested. With it, the best attributes of MQL’s will likely adapt based on evolving go-to-market strategies. It’s at this point that teams must make sure their lead scoring criteria is aligned with evolving tactics and strategies.
Conclusion
Revenue teams today have many CRM tools at their disposal, often these same tools go underutilized. Leveraging CRM solutions like HubSpot to position ‘lead scoring’ as that added layer of context between marketing and sales teams might be the push some organizations need. Following the strategies we’ve laid out above will help cross functional teams find efficiency in their growth programs and collectively drive better conversion rates throughout the whole pipeline, ultimately impacting bottom line revenue. If you’re feeling stuck and need a partner to help you level up your middle of funnel game, we cover the entire spectrum of sales enablement from CRM implementation to equipping your sales teams with the right tools, automation, and processes to succeed in their B2B market.
As a HubSpot solutions provider our digital marketing agency has direct access to resources that will help you capture and convert market share, fast.