“We have enough qualified leads for now. Thanks, though.” - No One Ever
Every business owner, salesperson and marketing professional can agree on one thing: they want more qualified leads coming through their CRM.
In many companies, marketing and sales go together like pizza and chocolate milk. To clarify, pizza and chocolate milk are two of my favorite things in the world, but they don’t exactly mesh. Does this relationship remind you of the relationship between your sales and marketing teams? Then you came to the right place.
Lead Scoring Sounds Cool, But What Is It?
ProFromGo has partnered with HubSpot for years. Not to brag or anything, but we are one of just a handful HubSpot gold partners in Pittsburgh. One of my personal favorite features in HubSpot’s robust software is it’s lead scoring abilities.
Lead scoring is pretty synonymous with HubSpot, but you may already be doing something similar in your own business. The idea of lead scoring is basically placing a value on all of the actions your website visitors are taking and then combining those actions (points) into an overall lead score.
Why Lead Scoring?
For example, let’s pretend you are the head of marketing at a company that manufactures custom ladders used for maintenance in airplane hangers across the country. The company had a big year and is looking to grow 20% year over year. As head of marketing, you suggested an inbound marketing strategy to reach potential decision-makers.
Fast-forward three months and you’ve published 20 blog posts, three pieces of gated content and have sent numerous marketing emails to contacts that are converting. In theory, it sounds great. You know it’s going to take a few months to get off the ground (pun intended), but your boss is starting to ask for some numbers. The new revenue isn’t quite there yet, but you have a bunch of new contacts and some exciting deals in the works. How do you know if your strategies are working or not? Lead scoring requires some upfront setup, but in the long run, it will help you nurture the right clients at the right time with the right message.
Email marketing is so saturated right now. Companies need to differentiate themselves from the competition by creating incredible, valuable and educational content. How do you know if you’re doing this? Check your lead scores.
How to Set Up Lead Scoring
Setting up a lead scoring strategy can be done in an hour, or even less. The part that is a bit more time consuming is deciding what to track, what values to place on each activity you’re tracking and then what to do with the lead scores.
A few things I like to look at in a lead scoring strategy are email opens, email clicks, pages viewed, time on site and form submissions. A form submission is probably the most valuable metric you would score, while the other metrics will all have similar values. The greater the number in any one of these KPIs, the greater the lead score.
Now comes the fun part. What do you do with the information you have? You can sort your contacts by lead score and then add lead score parameters in your workflows, or set up internal reminders for a sales rep to reach out. The more engaged the contact is, the higher the lead score, and the more likely they are to be a qualified lead.
Tying It All Together
All in all, lead scoring is exactly what it sounds like. Just because someone has a high lead score doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be a one-call close that becomes a lifetime customer. It’s like everything else, the more time you spend planning out your strategy, the more effective it will be.
Involve key team members in your discussion. Decide what metrics have meaning and always, always, always watch out for trends. HubSpot, and inbound marketing in general, is data driven. Use what you learn and continue to Grow Better.
