Lead scoring is an important thing to get right in any organisation generating a significant number of B2B leads, and many companies get it wrong.
The most common mistake is not using any lead scoring at all, and just throwing all the leads marketing generates to sales (most of which waste the sales rep's time).
If you're one step ahead of the game, and are scoring leads before you hand them off to sales, then you'll want to watch out for these 5 common mistakes marketers make time and time again.
1) Scores That Go Up, But Never Down
It's all well and good adding points for activity, but that doesn't take into account how recent the activity was. It's no good having leads with very high lead scores which haven't been active in months, or even years. A lead watching a webinar last week counts for a lot more than a lead watching a webinar 6 months ago.
When you're devising a lead scoring strategy, you should aim to work in a way to reduce a lead's score over time. One way of doing this using HubSpot's lead scoring is to ensure that points are only added when the most recent event happened within a certain time period.
So, for example, you could add 5 points to a leads score if they have more than 5 pageviews, but only if their most recent pageview was within the last 6 months. You could then add 10 points to a lead's score if they have more than 10 pageviews, but only if their most recent pageview was within the last three month, etc.
If time isn't factored into your lead scores, you'll end up with forever inflating lead scores which mask who your hottest leads really are.
2) Not Separating Activity From Demographics
It doesn't work if you add 5 points to a lead's score for viewing your pricing page, and also add 5 points to their score if they're a Managing Director. You need to devise a method for separating lead activity from demographic information.
If you have more than one lead score field, it's easy to assign one to demographic information, and another to activity. If you don't have this luxury, then we usually recommend using different columns within a lead's score to account for different things. For example, you may use the 1000's column for demographic information, then the hundreds, tens and single digits to account for lead activity.
A sales representative then knows that a lead with a score of 3,000 or higher is for example a senior manager at a large enterprise, a score of 2,000-2,999 is a middle manager at a large enterprise, etc. You can then setup a workflow which marks a lead as sales ready when they fall into certain score ranges. So, for example, a lead may become sales ready when they have a score that's either: a) between 3,200 and 3,999, b) 2,250 and 2,999 or c) between 1,400 and 1,999.
The added benefit of separating out demographic lead scoring from your activity lead scoring is that you can have different score thresholds for different leads. It might be that you want your sales reps to engage your best lead demographics when they have lower activity scores than your worse performing demographics, for example.
Modern marketing automation software like HubSpot allows you to create multiple lead scores, so you can have a score for activity, and a separate score for for demographics.
3) Setting and Forgetting
Lead scoring should always be treated as iterative. When you first start out, you'll likely be working with some hypotheses to do your lead scoring. You may notice that your best leads look at certain pages on your website, or download certain pieces of content, for example.
Once you have devised your initial lead scoring system it's important to monitor the results and make sure that you keep an eye on new trends emerging within your leads. For example, 6 months after implementing lead scores you may notice that leads that read lots of emails tend to end up with inflated lead scores which don't really represent how ready to buy they are. On that basis, you decide to reduce the impact that email engagement has on your overall lead score.
4) Treating Content The Same
A big mistake that many people make when devising a lead scoring system is treating all content the same. A lead which downloads a whitepaper titled "99 Ways to Incentivise Your Sales Team" should not be given the same number of points as a lead which downloads a whitepaper titled "How to Choose a CRM Vendor". The latter download represents someone more ready to buy a CRM system -- someone at least in the consideration stage of the buying process. The former download represents someone early in their research.
The same goes for website pages. Don't treat every pageview the same. A view to your pricing page is worth a lot more than someone viewing your "What is CRM?" page.
5) Failing to Work With Sales
When it comes to both setting up a lead scoring system and keeping it relevant, marketing needs to work closely with sales. I suggest a monthly meeting between someone in marketing and sales to discuss whether the leads with the highest scores represent the hottest leads, and what could be worked on to improve the quality of the score.
If marketing works on their own to set up lead scoring, it's inevitable that the leads which sales representatives value the highest won't be the leads which marketing rate the highest. It can be surprising some of the trends you notice in the leads which sales representatives have the most success with, and this insight is invaluable.
Poor Lead Scoring = Wasted Time
So if you're serious about improving the performance of your organisation's sales team, make sure you don't make the mistakes listed above. Remember that incorrectly scored leads result in sales teams chasing up and prioritising the wrong leads. That costs your organisation both in terms of increased expenses (additional sales reps) and reduced revenue (ineffective lead prioritisation).
