Which of your leads are sales-ready? Do you have a “hot list”?
To answer these questions you need lead scoring. Lead behavior scoring helps you quickly identify those leads that are sales-ready and those that need more nurturing.
We recently blogged about our “Quick and Easy Guide to Managing Your Leads.” One of the key factors in lead management is lead scoring. We proposed three general categories of lead scoring: demographic, behavior, and account-based. Each of these is useful in understanding where a prospect is in her buying journey. This blog post focuses on a methodology you can use for behavior scoring.
Behavior Scoring
A high behavior score tells you how likely a single lead is to buy your product.
It is based on the lead’s activities recorded by your marketing automation platform. Leads who visit your website, attend webinars, and download content are showing high interest. This tells you how interested the lead is in your products.
A good way to score your leads’ behavior is on a scale from zero to 100. Zero implies the lead has not interacted with your content. 100 indicates that the lead has interacted with your content in a way that indicates she is ready to buy. Marketing automation platforms are powerful tools that help you track a lead’s behavior. They can tell if a lead has visited a website, opened your email, or read your blog post. Each of these behaviors drives a change in behavior score.
Getting Started
To get started with behavior scoring you need to start by identifying which actions are indicators of a lead’s propensity to buy your product. To do this you should divide activities into four categories: Critical, Important, Influencing, and Bad Fit. If you read our blog post on Demographic Scoring, you will notice we use the same framework. Each behavior, or combination of behaviors, will fall into one of these four categories and will be scored appropriately.
Critical (10-15 Points)
When a lead engages with your content in a meaningful way, a way that is consistent with buying, it is considered critical behavior. Examples of this might be a visit to your pricing page, clicking a link in a sales email, attending a webinar, or visiting 10 of your web pages in a single day. When any of these activities occur, you should increment the lead’s behavior score by 10 to 15 points.
Important (5-9 Points)
Important behavior indicates that a lead is on its buying journey, but is not yet sales-ready. Examples of important behaviors are downloading a whitepaper, searching for your company name, visiting important landing pages, or visiting five web pages in a single day. These activities should increment a lead’s behavior score by 5 to 9 points.
Influencing (1-4 Points)
Influencing behavior occurs early in a lead’s lifecycle. Examples are visiting any of your web pages, opening an email, or registering for a webinar. When these activities happen, the lead’s behavior score should increment by 1 to 4 points.
Bad Fit (-10 Points)
It is important to decrease behavior scores when a lead exhibits behavior that is inconsistent with a buyer. Examples of this behavior are unsubscribing from email, a visit to the careers or investor page, or being added to the “do not call” list. These are all indications that a lead is not a buyer. When this occurs the lead’s behavior score should be decremented by 10 points.
Now What?
You are now ready to start scoring your leads based on how they interact with your digital content. At ORM we specialize in marketing analytics including lead scoring and revenue attribution. If you have questions or have some ideas to discuss, please let us know at info@orm-tech.com.