Traditionally, the start of a new year is always time for bold resolutions which we usually end up forgetting about pretty soon. But it can also be an opportunity to get started with new strategies or review existing ones.
But how do New Year’s resolutions fit with lead scoring criteria? Simple! The beginning of the year is the perfect time to review your lead scoring strategy.
Whether you already have it in place or you’re looking to implement a brand new one, having examples of the best lead scoring criteria can help you navigate this often uncharted territory.
In this article, we’ll explore what lead scoring is and we’ll briefly explore its main benefits to assess whether it is for you. Then, we’ll look at the top 5 lead scoring criteria you can use today to implement a successful lead scoring strategy and start accelerating your company’s growth!
Let’s get started!
PS: want to learn other ways to accelerate your company’s growth? Start here.
What is Lead Scoring And Is It For You?
Lead scoring is a process that involves ranking your leads so as to define their value to your company.
Think of lead scoring as a prioritization engine: when you have a lead scoring process in place, your sales team will instantly know which leads to follow-up with first as they are more likely to convert.
No two leads are exactly the same (even if they may look identical.) This is where lead scoring comes into play and helps to isolate and promote these differences so a salesperson understands better who they will be communicating with and whether they should have that conversation at all.
But what data you need to collect? While every business is different, having the right lead scoring criteria will ensure you have the right indicators when you are looking at your prospects to identify the ones who are more likely to convert.
Benefits Of Lead Scoring
Lead scoring, however, is not just beneficial to your sales team. Rather, lead scoring is an important process for any marketing and sales organization in that it can streamline the way that marketing pre-qualifies leads and make your sales team more efficient by following up with the right leads at the right time.
Let’s put some of this theory into practice and see whether lead scoring is for you. That’s an easy-to-answer question. It all comes down to this: is your company experiencing one (or more) of these issues?
- Your conversion rate is low;
- Your sales cycle is long;
- Your sales and marketing team are not aligned;
- You struggle to identify the ROI of lead generation initiatives.
If any of this looks familiar to your company – or at least one of the points above – then lead scoring is definitely for you. When setting up a lead scoring system, you’ll be able to:
- Increase your conversion rate: by finding high-converting leads, you’ll follow up with the people who are more likely to convert right now.
- Shorten your sales cycle: by knowing when to reach out to your best leads, you’ll close more deals faster.
- Break those silos and make your sales and marketing team get along: by having a process in place to decide precisely when (and how) lead handoff should happen.
- Easily identify the ROI of lead generation initiatives: by learning what resonates more with your high-converting prospects, you’ll learn what assets to create to convert more leads.
Ready to close more deals faster and accelerate your company’s growth? In the next section, we’ll see the 5 key lead scoring criteria you need to have to build your own lead scoring system.
Pro-tip: lead scoring can be more challenging the more sophisticated it gets. At Breadcrumbs, we’ll recommend the perfect lead scoring model for your business, and then help you identify your top prospects as they move through the sales funnel. You’d just need to connect to your Hubspot account, answer a few questions, and start getting more leads!
5 Best Lead Scoring Criteria
Lead Scoring Criteria #1: Recency
Recency is the first among our lead scoring criteria. This is because it is important to know how recently your prospects have interacted with your company.
In this sense, recency allows you to evaluate and prioritize activities that are happening right at this very moment.
You may argue that having the historical context of what a customer has done in the past is important as it helps to build the story of who they are.
This is undoubtedly true, but when it comes to following up you want to interact with your customers who are active right now and allow the historical data to help you shape the conversation with your prospects.
Lead Scoring Criteria #2: Frequency
Another important indicator that will help you prioritize your contacts is frequency. Broadly speaking, it means you’d be able to count how many times they are raising their hand at what you are proposing to them.
No actions are created equals, of course – and we’ll see it shortly – but you can definitely infer a stronger interest in a prospect that repeats an action in a short period of time.
For example, if a customer is continuously coming to your website and viewing 2-3 pages at a time for the course of a week, that should be a big signal that they are interested in learning more about your products and/or services.
This can be the perfect time to reach out – and offer more value.
Lead Scoring Criteria #3: Online + Offline Activities
It is often said that actions speak louder than words and that rings true for lead scoring as well. This is why next, on our lead scoring criteria review, we find activities.
Yes, plural. That’s because both online and offline activities (online especially these days) will help you in building your customer’s DNA in terms of implying what they are interested in.
All in all, online and offline activities help to identify what someone is interested in and how they like to consume their information. This is gold information for you – both in terms of being able to reach back to them with the right content and create that content in the first place.
A well-rounded lead scoring model can – and should – accommodate all the sources of where you collect information, including (but not limited to) your MAP, CRM, trade shows, ads, and social promotion.
Pro-tip: when you collect information from different sources, make sure you standardize your lead capture. This will allow you to ensure the quality of the data you are putting in your lead scoring system and have automation that actually works – and makes your life easier.
Lead Scoring Criteria #4: Job Title
Among our lead scoring criteria, job title may be the less intuitive one. However, collecting and scoring job titles correctly can go a long way in ensuring you are talking with the right person.
Why is that? As a salesperson will tell you, the job title provides great guidance around the level (if any) of decision-making and budget authority the person has.
While – of course – the ideal conversation your sales team may have is the ultimate decision-maker, it is crucial to identify people within the company that may have the authority to push the opportunity and conversations forward.
Scoring job titles correctly will help your sales team shape that conversation – push the deal forward and overcome any customer objections with the right person.
Pro-tip: When you start scoring on job title, make sure you account for the different variations of that title that someone could provide (as an example, they may report Vice President, Senior Vice President, and so on) – this will help ensure you are rewarding a job-title score appropriately.
Lead Scoring Criteria #5: Industry
Much like job titles, last (but not least) in the list of the 5 best lead scoring criteria, industry helps with aligning your product and/or service fit to companies that have shown success.
What if you could spot new opportunities by looking at how your team handled similar – successful or unsuccessful – cases in the past? That’s exactly what mapping and ranking industry in your lead scoring system.
How to do it? You can better understand this (and learn from your mistakes) by looking at your customer base (or past opportunities) to see if there is a correlation between closed-won opportunities and successful customers.
Pro-tip: there are many ways you can do so, for example through advocacy and renewals. Ask yourself (and the customer) what you did right and what you could have done better. You’ll learn loads, trust me.
Final Thoughts
Prioritize your leads correctly and ensure the quality of the data you collect on your prospective customers is vital to increase conversions, shorten the sales cycle, align your marketing and sales team and create content that fits with your higher converting customers and ultimately boost your company’s growth.
In this post, we have shared 5 tried and tested lead scoring criteria that you can implement today to get started with ranking leads and accelerate your company’s growth.
And now back to you: which are the best lead scoring criteria you’ve used in the past that are not mentioned in this article? Write them down in the comments below!
Building a lead scoring strategy from scratch seems complicated? We can help! Sign up for free with Breadcrumbs here to get started with your lead scoring model today or use our intuitive model builder to create an entirely custom one.
I’ve been struggling with finding the right lead scoring criteria for my company and stumbled in your article. Thanks for the detailed list of the top criteria to use – sometimes it can be tricky but it’s important to prioritize the ones that can make the biggest impact.
Great review of the top lead scoring criteria! Actually missing a couple of those and will be implementing soon.