Whether you’re a salesperson, a growth hacker, or a marketer, you know how important it is to find and nurture the right leads for your business.

But how do you know which leads are worth your time and effort, and which ones are not?

That’s where lead scoring comes in. It’s a method of ranking leads based on their profile and behavior, usually using a point system but as of late, even artificial intelligence (AI).

It helps you not only focus on the most qualified leads who are ready to buy but also allocate sales resources efficiently, ultimately increasing your sales conversions!

How to identify your best leads on LaGrowthMachine?

Learn all about the lead funnel in LaGrowthMachine:

  • The lead funnel stages in the app
  • The importance of lead qualification to generate better results
  • What are the lead qualifying options?
  • What are the 3 ways to qualify leads in LaGrowthMachine?

Want to move your leads from one stage to the next?

Learn how to qualify your leads on LaGrowthMachine

What is a Lead Scoring Method?

Lead scoring is simply assigning points based on criteria that qualify the lead, their company, and their activity.

Basically, going from a large list of leads, we’ll try to identify those most likely to bring about a sales conversion! This is true for sales, marketing, and usually, even lead generation

Lead scoring isn’t specifically linked to B2B or B2C, it rather becomes truly relevant from the moment you need to differentiate between a hot and a cold lead.

It’s useful at the two stages of sales outreach:

  • Part of your sales segmentation: Use lead scoring to group prospects into hot/warm/cold buckets so your sales team can prioritize their time accordingly.

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Principles of Lead Scoring Methods:

The whole point of lead scoring is to transform qualitative elements into a singular quantitative score.

Depending on the quality of the element we observe and the conclusion we draw from it, we’ll assign a higher or lower score representing the warmth of the lead and therefore, the degree of prioritization with which they should be approached.

Based on this, in the same way, we’ll be able to qualify those we want to talk to in our outreach campaign.

The two key aspects of a Lead Scoring Method:

In lead scoring, there are two types of criteria:

  • Attributes
  • Events

In the next parts, we will introduce 4 main categories:

  • Leads (people);
  • Accounts (companies);
  • Lead or account website;
  • Lead’s activity on our own website.

And for each category, we have specific attributes and events, as we’ll see in the next sections. For now, let’s define these notions!

Lead Scoring Attributes:

These are objective criteria about the lead or their company. Attributes are intrinsic and indisputable characteristics of a lead.

We can assign points to these attributes according to their relevance to our business.

Of course, there’s no magic formula: every business goes about its sales targeting differently, so it’s very important to have done your homework and defined your personas properly. 

Let’s dive into the different categories:

A. Lead attributes:

For the lead, their attributes can be:

  • Demographic: where they are located, their experience, how long they’ve been in the position, are they even paid?
  • Firmographic: their position in the company, their role within the company
  • Psychographic: their job title, their hierarchy

These are all attributes, and they’re what we’re going to use to a great extent in our sales segmentation.

As you saw in the examples above, LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes it super easy to search for leads based on their attributes:

We’re simply targeting Heads of Growth and Growth Hackers not in our LinkedIn contacts.

B. Company attributes:

Let’s move on to company attributes. For example, in the same way, we want to know if the company’s geography, sector of activity, number of employees, and revenue also grow.

Unlike the lead, these attributes concern the whole company.

C. Website attributes:

Our lead’s website can give us a lot of useful information for scoring! Website attributes can include:

  • Content: What are their CTAs? Their lead magnets?
  • Social media presence: Does the lead have any? Do they post every day? Once a week? Once a month? etc.
  • Technology: Do they use a tool that I can integrate with?

Lead Scoring Events:

Then there are event-related criteria. Events are cause-and-effect characteristics that enable us to draw conclusions from a lead’s action.

As is the case for attributes, events are divided into 3 categories, with a bonus event for the experts among our readers. 🥸

Lead events:

For lead events this time, we could observe elements. For instance, at LaGrowthMachine, we’d be looking at events such as:

  • Has my lead talked about certain sales topics on social networks that I could exploit?
  • The lead just mentioned our competitors in a LinkedIn post.
  • The lead has just hired someone or is hiring a sales manager. They’re hiring a growth expert, a Sales Development Representative (SDR), etc.

All these events are very strong signals to me that they are in the process of structuring their company. So we need to help them structure their processes, and that’s what LGM is here for.

How to identify your best leads on LaGrowthMachine?

Learn all about the lead funnel in LaGrowthMachine:

  • The lead funnel stages in LaGrowthMachine
  • The importance of lead qualification to generate better results
  • What are the lead qualifying options?
  • What are the 3 ways to qualify leads in LaGrowthMachine?

Want to move your leads from one stage to the next?

Learn how to qualify your leads on LaGrowthMachine

Company events:

For accounts, we could look at events like:

  • Is the company hiring people?
  • Is it changing technology?
  • Are they recruiting?
  • Are they raising funds?
  • Have they been in the press recently?
  • Are they laying people off?
  • etc.

These are all events specific to the company itself. Even if the company has attributes that match our ICP & Persona, the event-related criteria are still critical to take into account.

Website events:

For events linked to the lead’s website, we could also consider looking at their pages to see if they mention any elements that could link our business to them. For instance, do they use a specific piece of software that your solution integrates with?

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BONUS Event: Lead’s activity on our website:

Here, we can only score on lead events, not attributes.

We’re particularly interested in the lead’s interaction(s) with our website:

  • Which pages did they visit?
  • How long did they stay on the website?
  • Were they interested in specific pages?
  • etc.

Based on these interactions (qualitative), we can assign a warmth score to the lead (quantitative).

Of course, tools like Google Analytics or MixPanel are great for analyzing your website’s data to identify which people clicked and stayed on which links.

But there are other possibilities too, such as the possibility of identifying the companies that visit your site.

Solutions like Leadfeeder, for example, allow you to install a small piece of script on your site and identify the companies that visit your site.

User Journey in Lead Scoring:

It’s extremely important to make the link between attributes and events. The combination of both gives you a true insight into your lead’s user journey/experience

Attributes are often the starting point for segmentation. Events, on the other hand, have an influence on the ongoing campaign or the post-campaign.

Initially, attributes will help me choose who to contact. They can even help me decide whether I give more weight to my scores.

If I rely solely on attributes, I won’t know whether the leads are hot or not. Maybe they don’t care if I contact them. They may already be equipped and therefore have no interest in changing tools.

That’s why it’s so important to always make the link between attributes and events if you want to succeed in a lead scoring method.

How to use Lead Scoring Methods in your sales outreach?

Let’s take it a step further.

Let’s imagine, again, that I’m running an LGM campaign. I’m sending a prospecting sequence with an email and I’m tracking its open rate.

If today, the lead opens my email, that just means they’ve seen it. The proof of interest is somewhat minimal.

As a result, the score associated with it will be low. Maybe I’ll give them 2 points. If they click on a link, I’ll give them 3 points.

But what if my email is reopened a second time, two weeks later, and a third time, one day after that?

Well, it tells us that the first time, they’d just taken note of my email, maybe they didn’t have enough time to dive into it. At the same time, they said: “Ah, I’ll look when I have time.”

And then, it’s opened twice in one day, and after more than a week, they open my email yet again, even clicking on my link again. Now the lead is very hot! They opened my email twice in a row and clicked on my link. They’re on fire!

If I pick up the phone and call them, I’ll close them.

All the events that make up our leads’ user experience will get a certain number of points.

In the scenario I’ve just described, what happened is that we understood that the person just didn’t have the time at the start, but now they do. As a result, I’ve got to have an extremely strong signal: call them right away!

Let’s check out another example! 😉

Final Thoughts:

If you score, you can prioritize. And if you prioritize, you sell better. This is our mantra, and if you’re in sales, it should be yours too!

In the end, it all comes down to the fact that you have to think about the user journey of the lead in front of you: 

Whether or not they read your emails, are very active on LinkedIn, etc.

If you manage to understand and synthesize all this, you’ll be able to score your leads properly.

We’ve tried to give you as many tips and examples as possible in this article, and we hope you’ve understood how lead scoring methods work.

As a bonus, we invite you to check out our full tutorial on how to qualify your leads using LGM.