What Is Contact Scoring?

DEFINITION
Contact scoring is a methodology that involves ranking contacts (enter: leads and customers alike) based on criteria such as company information and how and how recently they’ve interacted with your business. It allows you to identify high-value opportunities, re-engage clients you can cross-sell or upsell to, and capture disenfranchised clients before they’re gone for good. 

💡Understanding Contact Scoring

Consumers today demand personalization; delivering a relevant and gap-free buying experience is vital. With RevOps programs, you can do so with many tools such as analytics, CRM, and automation SaaS tools.

However, many organizations still struggle with making sense of all the data they have and compiling them in an actionable way. This is essential to deliver the right action at the right time instead of inundating prospects and customers with activity regardless of their current stage in their buyer’s journey.

Enter: Contact scoring.

High-quality contact scoring tools use first-party and third-party data to crunch the numbers with machine learning and rank contacts to identify when you need to take action.

Contact scoring can be applied not only to leads (read: lead scoring) but to all the stages of the buyer’s journey, encompassing upsell and cross-sell and detecting customers at risk of churning.

🖋 Takeaway

Aggressively growing your business’s revenue will be most effective with a customer-centric approach. And in today’s world, that means personalization, timeliness, and multiple touchpoints. 

It can be challenging to offer this kind of experience with B2B brands unless you have a solid and up-to-date contact scoring system. Contact scoring should be at the heart of your RevOps program and utilized for your marketing, sales, and customer service departments. 

High-quality contact scoring can help you identify high-value leads to nurture into customers, re-engage customers you can cross-sell or upsell to, and capture disenfranchised clients before they’re gone for good. 

This means more opportunities to create personalized, high-value customer experiences that will accelerate profit and business growth like nothing else.

What Is Contact Scoring?

Say you own a SaaS SEO tool. A lead finds you through an ad, and they sign up for a free trial. Your sales approach is to reach out during that trial period, offer a free demo to walk them through the tool, and show them add-on features to make it more useful.

You see that this user has signed up for the trial and that they opened multiple emails but never converted. They seem to be in your target demographic, so your sales team keeps reaching out and reaching out.

But maybe while you looked at your lead’s frequency, engagement, and monetary data, your contact scoring model was a little outdated and didn’t track recency.

If you had tracked recency, you would have found out that they did their two-week trial a month ago; that they didn’t know the advanced features they required were available; and that they ended up going to a competitor.

That’s a lost customer, and maybe all they needed was a personalized walkthrough at the right time to convert. 

You need up-to-date, high-quality data so your sales and marketing teams can act quickly, allowing them to pull data from your GTM stack to create an action-based team that drives actual results and more sales than you would have closed otherwise. 

What Data Should I Consider For Contact Scoring?

In order to score a contact, most contact scoring will look at an individual’s basic demographic data, like their job title, how many employees their company has, and what industry they belong to.

The best contact scoring tools also factor in the following scoring criteria:

• Engagement data. These are the types of interactions a contact has had with your business. Have they viewed a landing page multiple times? Have they opened or responded to your emails? Have they purchased at least once? 
• Recency data. Recency tells you how recently a contact took a specific action. Someone who just reached out to your business within the last two days is much more likely to convert than someone who got in touch two months ago. 
• Frequency data. How often is an individual contact engaging with your business? High-value contacts and customers are those using your SaaS tool frequently, purchasing products regularly, and opening your emails day in and day out to learn about new products or services. 
• Monetary data. Monetary data reveals how much an individual contact spends as a customer and can help you assess where there’s room for cross-selling or up-selling.

These are all key factors you need to consider when using contact scoring to determine when you should reach out to a lead or a client to offer a special deal or try to initiate an upsell. And all of that data is time-sensitive.

What’s The Difference Between Contact Scoring And Lead Scoring?

In a few words, lead scoring looks at only one stage of the customer journey, while contact scoring encompasses all the stages of the buyer’s journey. In the words of our CEO and founder, Armando Biondi:

But why is this only a marketing need to be applied to leads? Truth is, and the most successful organizations have known it for years: it’s not.

In fact, why not look at your customers in the same way across all your online properties and organizational functions (marketing, product, sales, success, support)?

This is precisely what contact scoring does: providing you with a holistic and actionable view of your customers’ demographics, firmographics, activity, and behavior so you can act on the most engaged contacts when they are most likely to convert.

Getting Started With Contact Scoring

High-quality contact scoring tools like Breadcrumbs will pull data across all of your touchpoints: your marketing automation platform (i.e., HubSpot), your CRM (i.e., Salesforce), and the actual product usage tools (i.e., Pendo, Mixpanel, Segment) to give you a genuinely holistic view of what activities and actions are driving behavior.

With these data points, you’re already ahead of the competition and a few steps away from implementing a robust GTM motion and accelerating revenue and business growth.

What’s next? Define your goals and start building models that create actionable scores you can use to drive workflows and actions (i.e., in-app messages, email campaigns, sales outreaches).

We’re here to help. Schedule some time with one of our Revenue Experts, and we’ll talk about what you’re trying to achieve and whether we can assist. If there’s a fit, we’ll work together to meet your objectives.