Lead scoring: definition and method for your marketing scoring

What Is Lead Scoring?

Understanding the Term "Lead"

The word "lead" refers to a commercial opportunity for a business—a contact who demonstrates a certain level of interest in your company's offering.

Leads play a crucial role in any company's sales process. They share their contact information to express genuine interest in your offering. Lead generation helps you build a rich, constantly updated database of potential prospects.

Your inbound marketing strategy must foster this regular, high-quality contact acquisition.

However, simply generating leads isn't enough—you must nurture relationships with these contacts. This is where lead nurturing and lead scoring strategies become essential.

Lead Scoring Definition

Lead scoring involves automatically assigning a score to each of your leads—a certain number of points based on their actions and characteristics. This scoring system relies on predefined criteria, encompassing both demographic scoring and behavioral scoring.

The goal is to answer fundamental questions that enable marketing and sales teams to work together effectively: Who are my prospects? How do they interact with my company? Can they convert into customers?

Once you've answered these questions, you can classify your leads according to their maturity level and take appropriate actions to convert them into customers, or avoid wasting time on individuals who don't match your target profile.

By understanding where a lead sits in your funnel, both sales and marketing teams can allocate their time and resources intelligently. This lead scoring methodology is a critical component of marketing automation, automatically assigning more points to engaged prospects attracted to your offering.

Lead scoring helps you manage large volumes of leads automatically while avoiding poor-quality prospects and optimizing your marketing efforts.

The Value of Lead Scoring

Lead scoring enables you to segment your contacts according to their maturity level in your marketing funnel. To identify their stage of advancement, points are automatically assigned based on pre-established rules. This scoring can vary based on:

• Prospect characteristics and your knowledge level about them: motivations, demographic data, social information, etc.

• Actions undertaken by the prospect: visiting key pages, search intent, clicking specific links, etc.

• Prospect engagement with your company: downloads, subscriptions, contact requests, social media follows, etc.

All these criteria should be defined according to your company's domain and the amount of personal information you possess about your leads. Obviously, the higher the score, the more your lead is viewed as a potential buyer. Conversely, if the score is low, you can set aside that prospect.

Thanks to this system, you can determine which prospects are ready to be handed off to sales teams—effortlessly. As mentioned earlier, none of this is possible without a solid marketing and sales alignment. Beyond creating an effective lead scoring strategy, you'll better optimize your sales and marketing processes by involving both teams equally.

You'll be able to process your contacts more easily and quickly!

A Scoring Grid Example

To illustrate this concept, here's a simple, basic lead scoring example. Every time a visitor lands on your website, they provide valuable information. This information can be collected to create a lead scoring system. You simply need to distribute points for each action taken, such as:

• +3 points to leads who read one of your blog articles

• +10 points for leads who download one of your lead magnets

• +20 points for leads matching your ideal customer profile

As you can see, points are awarded based on actions taken (downloading and reading an article) and characteristics of the person (industry sector and profile).

In cases where a prospect provides only irrelevant information—like a fake email address, rarely reads your articles, or works in an industry that doesn't match your focus—you can deduct points from their score.

This way, you clearly see where your prospects are in their buying cycle, helping you organize your actions according to the individuals you want to target.

Benefits of a Lead Scoring Strategy

While implementing a lead scoring strategy can be somewhat tedious, it offers numerous advantages for both large enterprises with well-defined marketing and sales departments and SMBs. Time is a precious resource for any company, and it must be spent intelligently. But that's not all!

79% of marketing prospects never convert into customers. (Source: HubSpot)

If this figure seems shocking, it's unfortunately quite real. And why is it difficult to convert prospects into customers? Because our time is poorly allocated, our efforts aren't used wisely, and marketing and sales aren't aligned... All reasons proving that implementing lead scoring is important for improving marketing statistics.

Save Time by Automatically Processing Prospects

The lead scoring system helps you quickly identify qualified leads versus those who aren't. Your objective is to avoid wasting time on profiles with little to no interest in your offering, allowing you to focus efforts on those attracted to your company and what you offer. It's up to you to work your strategy!

And time saved equals money saved! Lead scoring unconsciously contributes to maintaining healthy revenue by reducing marketing and acquisition costs, analyzing what works, for whom it works, or conversely, what doesn't work.

Increase Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rates

Not all prospects have the same value and don't deserve the same attention. With lead scoring, you can categorize your prospects based on their maturity level in the marketing funnel. You'll know which ones should be handled by the sales team and which need lead nurturing campaigns.

Lead scoring helps advance your leads through the buying journey and increase their maturity level. This allows you to concentrate your efforts solely on those with scores high enough for customer conversion.

Align Sales and Marketing with Lead Scoring

For a lead scoring strategy to work, marketing and sales teams must imperatively collaborate and align their processes. The marketing team must generate and provide qualified prospects to sales reps, who in turn must report field events to adjust the scoring system.

"Hot" prospects are identified by the marketing team, and sales reps can then judge their interest level. We then speak of MQL for a Marketing Qualified Lead and SQL for a Sales Qualified Lead.

💡 Remember: by using lead scoring, marketing automation, and lead nurturing together, you'll launch more effective and relevant campaigns.

How to Assign a Score to a Lead

In lead scoring, you can assign scores based on characteristics (industry sector, geographic area, job type, etc.) or behaviors (document downloads, time spent on website, demo requests, etc.) of prospects.

These criteria should be defined according to your company's sector and the knowledge you have through your buyer personas. Scores can be positive or negative.

Socio-Demographic Characteristics

If you target a specific population segment, you should collect demographic information through forms, for example, to verify that your prospects truly belong to your target audience. Otherwise, deduct points from those who don't match your company.

You can also target prospects based on their company (size, industry sector, B2C or B2B, etc.) and gather information useful for awarding or removing points.

Company Details

Whether your objective is identifying companies based on size, category, or activity domain, you can integrate questions into your landing page forms.

These will provide essential data for assigning points to leads belonging to your target audience while deducting points from those who don't.

Email Engagement

A prospect's subscription to receive emails doesn't necessarily guarantee purchase intent. Their true intentions can be deduced from open rates and clicks, for example.

It's necessary to know who opens each email or interacts with promotional offers, links, etc., present in emails to focus your attention on the most active leads.

Email interaction levels can be used to assign higher scores to leads who open, read, click, etc.

Online Behaviors

The behaviors and actions visitors can take on your website provide enormous information about their purchase intentions.

You can analyze downloads, types and numbers of pages viewed, forms completed, etc. These elements will allow you to award points, or not.

Social Media Engagement

A prospect's engagement with a company on social networks can also reflect their investment level. The number of times a prospect has interacted with a tweet or company publication can serve as reliable indicators.

If your target customer is actively present on your social networks, it might be wise to award additional points to prospects showing interest via these platforms.

💡 These criteria ensure that the score you assign to your prospects truly represents the probability they'll make a purchase with your company.

It's up to you to define which criteria will be important. You might consider that a "gmail.com" address doesn't qualify a prospect and deduct 3 points from their score. But you might also determine that someone working in the same sector as you deserves 5 additional points.

How to Succeed with Your Lead Scoring Strategy

Define Your Personas and Scoring Criteria

The first step is defining your personas to gain clear understanding of your target audience and characteristics that constitute your typical customers. You'll then know if a prospect can match your product and/or service.

But that's not all! You must also choose and list the behaviors and criteria to score—those that seem important and will indicate whether a prospect is ready to be handled by the sales team.

As mentioned earlier in the article, this is where we discuss behavioral scoring (examples: newsletter subscription, whitepaper download, web page visit, form completion, etc.) and demographic scoring (examples: geographic location, professional sector, gender, etc.).

These criteria must obviously align with your personas. Don't hesitate to adjust them over time based on sales team feedback. You can also use Google Analytics to identify your prospects' actions.

💡 Don't forget to also determine negative behaviors that show lack of interest or disengagement from your prospects.

Understand the Customer Journey for Lead Scoring

To implement an effective lead scoring strategy, you must also understand your customers' journey. To do this, use the data you already possess. This is an important step because a prospect who isn't mature enough won't be ready to schedule an appointment, for example. We generally distinguish:

• "Hot" leads: ready to buy your offering or need only a small push to make their purchase decision (example: free trial)

• "Cold" leads: still need convincing. This is where your content marketing strategy proves itself by nurturing your prospects with content that speaks to them and addresses their challenges

• "Dead" leads: cannot be converted because they're outside your target. They generally visit your site without purchase intent

By understanding your prospect's journey and the buying cycle they're in, you'll know both how to help them advance and how to assign points based on their maturity level in the customer journey.

Determine the Scoring Scale

Once you have a clear picture of your target, journey, and associated content, you can create the scoring scale that works best for you. For example:

• If your prospect is still in research phase and downloads a template or reads one of your articles, you might award 5 points

• If they participate in an event like a webinar, you can add 10 points

• And if they request a demonstration of your offering, you can give 20 points

Each time your prospect advances in their journey and crosses a higher stage, don't hesitate to add points. Once you consider your prospect sufficiently "hot," you can send them to the sales team.

This process remains consistent: prospects have a problem to solve. To do this, they seek solutions and try to form an opinion to make a choice. To successfully convert, you must focus on your target and provide appropriate content to help them make a decision.

Which Tool Allows Lead Scoring Monitoring?

For managing your leads and lead scoring strategy, marketing automation software exists. These tools help you save time by automatically performing repetitive, daily tasks based on your criteria.

All your contact information will be centralized to facilitate work for sales teams and marketing teams who can rely on it. Numerous CRMs are available.

You'll be able to work your strategies and find potential customers quickly. It will also be easier to sort and clean contact data, indicate which stage of the buying cycle they're in, etc.

Analyze and Adjust Your Lead Scoring

Nothing guarantees your lead scoring system will work as desired. You must regularly analyze your process to see if it's effective and optimize it when needed. You must be able to adapt to changes.

Your company, personas, market, and data will constantly evolve. That's why you must keep an eye on your strategy.

You'll then determine which of your prospects are sufficiently mature in your funnel and take necessary actions to close maximum sales.