Creating a scoring model is daunting and is often put off because the team are unsure of what should be included. Putting together a good scoring model does not happen overnight, it takes a little bit of time to get it up and running, fine tune it and then comes the ongoing effort to keep it running optimally.
About the author: Matthew Johnson is marketing expert and contributes his knowledge about lead scoring and lead management to the success of Strateco and its clients.
How do you get started…Well the corner post of any lead scoring model is a solid “Marketing Qualified Lead” definition, sales and marketing need to agree on what constitutes a qualified lead. Once the definition has been settled upon you can take the individual criteria of the definition and build them into a model.
A good model needs to include Demographic, BANT and Behavioural data. Demographic data would include information regarding the contact person and their company. BANT – well everyone knows what that is and for those who don’t Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline.
Behavioural data – This is the latest addition to the scoring model and something that is often collected even before a marketer has captured any demographic data for a prospect. Many systems are able to gather website behaviour data and match it to a record once the demographic data is captured.
When it comes to behavioural data it is important to keep two things in mind – recency and frequency. A site visit today is worth more than a site visit for 3 months. Where possible as time lapses the point’s allocation should decrease to. Frequency, a regular visitor is worth more than a one off visitor.
Once the criteria has been finalised it is time to assign a point’s value to it. After points have been allocated, the criteria must be given a weighting based on importance. Finally the tipping points or thresholds need to be determined. This will decide at which point a contact / prospect is pushed across to sales, as a marketing qualified lead, for further qualification.
Now is the time to roll out your model. It is best to do a soft roll out at first and monitor how the model performs.
The weighting and point’s allocation need to be adjusted and fine-tuned until such time as sales agree that the type of lead and the quality of the leads is optimal. Once this has been reached the model can be rolled out to the remainder of those involved. But don’t let it run too long, your work is not done yet.
Stay updated and read the third part of Lead Scoring Praxistipps next Friday.
