The best response is a “Yes”, the next best is “No”. “Maybe” is a waste of time. Don’t waste your time and attention nurturing leads that are still on the fence. Engaging with unqualified leads unnecessarily lengthens your sales cycle because it inaccurately defines its starting point. If your prospect isn’t ready to buy yet, leave them in the marketing funnel and only pursue them as a sales lead when they’re ready.
That said, it’s never too early to engage with someone to build relationships. However, prioritize your activities and efforts to match their readiness. Ensure they’re only receiving what’s relevant to them depending on where they are in their buyer’s journey or decision-making process, and don’t pester them to close if they’re not ready.
We’ve already discussed lead qualification and the BANT framework. Let’s now explore lead scoring: the practice of assigning a value (i.e. score) to help identify and prioritize “warmer” vs. “colder” leads that are closer to making a purchase. Here’s what it might look like:
- Each time a prospect visits our website = +1 point
- Prospect unsubscribes from email = -50 points
- Prospect attends 3 or more workshops = +30 points
- Prospect visits product page = +15 points
- Prospect adds product to cart = +40 points
A prospect’s overall score is a tally of individual scores associated with their actions and behaviors. Since you can’t assign a value to an action or behavior that you’re unable to observe or track, the effectiveness of your lead scoring will heavily depend on your data capture practices. The actions you choose to score and the values associated with specific actions vary across industries and solutions. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach or best practice for lead scoring; instead, it’s an evolving process that you’ll refine over time as you gain a better understanding of which actions hold the most significance.
A good lead scoring model should take into consideration:
- Customer profile fit (accounting for characteristics in the BANT framework – BUDGET, AUTHORITY, NEED, and TIMELINE, that you can identify)
- Engagement behaviors that you can track. such as the # of pages viewed on your website, specific pages visited (e.g., product page, pricing page), the # of emails opened, email open rate, the # of times an email was forwarded, conversions from specific emails, form submissions, and downloads of lead magnets, among others.
- Intent behaviors, such as searching for solutions, visiting competitor websites, reading reviews, and comparing alternatives. These behaviors are often observed on external websites, not your own. To capture and utilize this valuable data, companies can turn to intent data providers like Bombora, Cognism, and 6sense.
- Recency decay, the assumption that a lead’s interest diminishes over time without any additional purchase-signaling behavior.
- Accumulate with repeat visits. For example, if someone visits your pricing page repeatedly, we can readily assume they’re extremely interested.
- Negative behaviors like unsubscribing, posting negative reviews, and abusing free trials.
Not applicable to all businesses, but here are some additional considerations you might want to include in your scoring framework:
- Opportunity size or deal value.
- Potential for future business.
- Reputation of the lead and the potential to leverage them to close other prospects.
- Complexity of the potential project
That said, scoring models can become relatively complex. Don’t worry about accounting for everything when you begin; it’s more important to start small and improve from there. As you grow, or if you’re a large organization, you can also consider Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) powered lead scoring tools. They are capable of running much larger comparative models across larger datasets and can self-improve and learn over time with minimal supervision.
With lead scoring in place, you can establish automated workflows or notifications that activate when a prospect’s score surpasses a specific threshold, typically designating them as a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). This designation signifies their status as a high-priority prospect warranting direct engagement in the sales process. Most established CRM tools provide the ability to automatically track your customers’ behavior and assign lead scores, but you can also do it manually when you’re beginning.
ASSIGNMENT
- What are some positive engagement and intent behaviors that you can capture? Assign values to them along with the customer characteristics you’ve defined in the previous qualification assignment.
- What are some negative behaviors? Assign negative scores to them.