What is lead scoring and how do you do it right?

You have a nice website, and thousands of people visit it daily. But how do you know who is actually interested in what you have to sell? Some people might’ve visited your website by accident. Or, maybe some customers have researched your brand and are ready to buy immediately. The solution to finding these motivated customers is lead scoring.

It allows you to understand how interested someone is in your product or service. Below, I’ll talk about what is lead scoring, its benefits, and how to calculate a lead score in three easy steps.

What is lead scoring?

Lead scoring is a process used by sales and marketing teams to understand the likelihood of a customer buying your product or service.

Typically, businesses use a scale of one to 100; the higher the score, the higher the likelihood of purchase. In this score, you’ll consider lead scoring criteria such as:

• How long someone stays on your website
• Which pages they visit (pricing page, about page)
• If they subscribe to your email newsletter
• If they communicate to your customer support team to learn more

Once you have an idea of a prospect’s interest levels, you can tailor lead nurturing and pass them on to your sales team.

For example, if someone is still learning about your product, you could use blog posts to educate them. And if a prospect is ready to buy, you can simply send them to your sign-up page.

The best lead scoring models

If you’re looking to identify and bring in hot leads, consider these lead-scoring models:

• Purchase intent model
• Online behavioral model

Purchase intent model

The purchase intent model is the most common leading scoring model, referring to the prospect’s conversion probability. You give them a score based on your lead qualification criteria. The more factors that customers meet, the more likely they will buy from you.

Fortunately, you can use your Google Analytics dashboard to collect insights from customers, like what pages they are visiting and how long they are staying on your website. You can then use this to score individual customers.

Online behavioral model

Another good lead-scoring method is the online behavioral model, which gives the prospect points based on their actions. This lead scoring algorithm could look something like: 

• Visiting your pricing page gets five points
• Filling in a form gets eight points
• Requesting a demo gets 10 points

When you determine which actions have the most value to your business, you can accurately determine how likely a customer is to buy.

How to calculate a lead score in three easy steps

Here’s how to calculate a lead score in three easy steps:

1. Unite sales and marketing data
2. Talk to your customers
3. Map your customer journey

Step 1: Unite sales and marketing data

Before you start calculating lead scores, knowing which leads have the highest possibility of converting is important. The best way to do this is to analyze leads that have already converted.

So dig into your CDP (Customer Data Platform) and uncover any patterns. With Lytics, you can organize first-party data into a single profile to get insight into customer behaviors across platforms.

Step 2: Talk to your customers

Next, conduct a handful of interviews and talk to customers about what convinced them to buy. Gather a list of these traits, and it’ll help you understand which actions to attribute the most points to.

For instance, if you learn that the copywriting on your pricing page persuaded many existing customers to buy, give more points to prospects visiting your pricing page.

Step 3: Map your customer journey

The last part is using the information you’ve gathered from customers to create a customer journey map.

This customer journey should be as detailed as possible. If your main traffic source is Facebook Ads, and web visitors typically subscribe to your email newsletter before buying, your customer journey will look something like this:

Once you’ve listed out these customer actions, track each customer’s web behavior and start scoring using your lead scoring software.

Benefits of lead scoring

Ready to introduce lead scoring into your business? Great! These are some of the benefits you’ll experience:

• It reduces marketing costs
• You waste less time
• There’s better sales and marketing alignment
• You boost revenue 

It reduces marketing costs

The primary reason why businesses are implementing lead scoring is that it helps them identify high-quality leads. They can then focus on acquiring these customers and abandon marketing campaigns targeting low-quality leads, reducing marketing costs.

You waste less time

Because you’re not trying to convert customers with low lead scores, you save time and resources. So if you spend hours on sales calls and marketing campaigns that aren’t going anywhere, try lead scoring. For example, you could implement a rule where your sales team only connects to prospects with a lead score above 70.

There’s better sales and marketing alignment

It’s common for sales reps to complain to the marketing department about receiving unqualified leads. But when you introduce lead scoring, you encourage your sales and marketing teams to work together. It ensures that whenever marketing passes a lead to sales, this lead is highly motivated and ready to buy. Your salespersons won’t have to waste their time on people who aren’t interested.

You boost revenue 

The best benefit is the increased revenue you experience when scoring leads.

This is because attracting and onboarding every lead has an associated cost. So when you can effectively identify hot leads, you tailor your marketing to appeal to these customers’ needs. This personalized customer experience increases revenue.