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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?
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.
Example 🔍
For instance, you would assign much higher scores to prospects that you deem need your product/service than those who are already equipped.
This can be nuanced, we’ll take a look at it later 😉
- Part of your lead follow-up campaign: Scoring your leads helps you track prospects’ behavior and engagement.
Example 🔍
You won’t be making sales calls to all potential hot leads in your campaign. Lead scoring helps you prioritize your callbacks.
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.
Example 🔍
If a company we’re trying to target is firing people, we’ll deduct points.
If they’re hiring people, we add points. If they’re hiring salespeople, we add extra points!
If, in a LinkedIn post, they mention another sales automation tool, we assign more points because that’s highly relevant to us.
So on and so forth.
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.
Example 🔍
An attribute can be the lead’s job title, their tool stack, a company’s field of activity, etc.
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.
Quick Tip 💡
In sales prospecting, you can decide to target the lead, the account, or to target the leads in the accounts.
The latter option is known as an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy
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?
Example 🔍
My prospect has installed the HubSpot tracker. This means they’re using HubSpot.
Since LaGrowthMachine has an integration with HubSpot, I will be able to bring them added value.
I’ll probably use it within my lead scoring system as a way of boosting this lead’s score against another one that uses Salesforce which we don’t support.
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.
Example 🔍
Did they click or open the email? Did they accept me on LinkedIn? Did they visit my profile?
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?
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.
Example 🔍
If we see events such as layoffs or downsizing, it’s probably not the right time to sell software to the company in question.
Even though we, at LGM, might want to target a lead gen agency because it matches our ICP, our target company could be in a difficult situation.
It’s wiser to wait for another (better) opportunity.
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?
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).
Example 🔍
For instance, if a lead visits my website once, it means they’re probably interested.
If they visit it several times, we can consider them more interested, which means we give them a higher rating.
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.
Example 🔍
If one of my prospects doesn’t click on the link sent via my outreach campaign, but their company does visit my website:
- Maybe they forwarded my e-mail.
- Or maybe they even talked about it over coffee.
These are the kinds of insights you can get from this analysis.
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.
Example 🔍
Say I’m running a multi-channel campaign with LGM. I’m not going to call all my lead list, I’m only going to call those who are more likely to convert.
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.
Example 🔍
As for events, say I visit the lead’s profile now and they view mine in return, that’s a sign of interest.
If I follow them on Twitter and they follow me back, that’s another sign of interest.
If I send them an email and they open it, again, proof of interest.
They click on my link, proof of interest. They visit my website, another proof of interest.
They fill in a form for a white paper, again, proof of interest.
You get the gist.
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! 😉
Example 🔍
We may have exactly the same thing happen on the lead’s website:
I contact people. I have them in my database now. Following their website, I notice that today, they’re equipped with Salesforce. But LGM doesn’t yet support Salesforce, but I keep analyzing their website.
Tomorrow, I’ll get a notification that they’ve just added the Hubspot tracker.
Now I’m in the thick of it, I’ve got a really big event coming up: The lead is setting up their HubSpot.
As a result, many things are changing with the setup of this new CRM. They’re maybe rethinking their stack. I need to take advantage of this moment to get in touch with them immediately!
Changing technology is also generally a good thing to consider. It’s also a major event in the development of your website, and in the user experience of your site.
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.
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