Lead Scoring

Written By: Sam Koekemoer

Related page: Lead Score Optimization

Introduction

Lead scoring is FunnelBud's way of measuring lead engagement with your website / company. Every tracked action a lead takes can be used to contribute towards the lead score, which includes:

  • Field Values (having any value OR specific values)
  • Page Visits
  • Campaign Interactions
  • Form Completions
  • Email Clicks
  • Media Views

You can find the lead scoring settings here

Using Lead Scoring Effectively

Timing is Critical

One of the most important factors in whether a sale will be won or lost is in the timing of your contact with the lead; knowing when the lead is ready to engage with the sales team can make all the difference. With lead scoring it becomes easy to identify leads that have been actively engaging with your content to approach them at just the right time.

Correctly Weighting your Lead Scores

The accuracy of lead scores is directly dependent on how well the individual scoring criterion are weighted. At first, the weights will be set by the marketing team using their best guesses of what actions are more important than others. Once there have been a few sales won and lost, the Sales team can join with the Marketing team and go through the lead's scores together to identify which actions were more important when determining a qualified lead that was ready to be sold to. FunnelBud can consult with your team during this process to help guide you to make good decisions to optimize this process.

This process of weighting updates is an iterative process that will never be complete, with each revision the lead score becomes more and more accurate as a measure of lead engagement. Over time your content will change, as will the ratio of the types of content (emails, landing pages, media) that your leads engage with. By default then, leads will be interacting with different amounts and different types of content before they are warm enough to be sold to, thus the average lead score at the point of sales qualification will become different over time and thus our criterion weightings also need to change.

The most important thing to note is that the RELATIVE score of different actions should be logical, for example page views might have the lowest score, email clicks a few more points, and form completions with the highest number of points. For example, you might think that 5 page views is equivalent to 1 email click, so setting page views to 1 and email clicks to 5 would make sense.

Custom rules let you set rules indicative of specific buying behaviors, such as viewing pricing pages, references & case studies.

Using Lead Scores to identify Warm Leads

There are two primary ways to make the sales team aware of warm leads, sending notification emails and setting a Qualified lead status.

  • Notification Actions: Notifications must be sent to a user or a specific email address, however FunnelBud also provides the option to send the notification to the lead's Owner, as long as they have one. If they don't, then the default person will receive the notification.
  • Qualified Lead Status: Leads marked as Qualified will appear within the left sidebar in the Sales Pipeline, allowing the Sales team to have easy access to them and create opportunities where relevant. Any leads marked Qualified that are determined not to be interested should be updated to an Unqualified status.

You can use Visual Workflows to set up rules and actions for when leads have a high lead score, to notify someone and/or mark them as Qualified.

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Example qualification workflow that excludes open opportunities and existing customers (optional)

Options to remove focus from unengaged leads

Both of the options below can be set in the lead scoring settings here (bottom of the page)

Lead Score Decay

Lead score decay is essential to moving old leads out of the spotlight, it is designed to make older interactions less important than more recent actions. Lead score decay is managed via the Lead Score Half Life setting, which halves the lead score after X amount of weeks (set by the user). The number of weeks that it takes to halve a lead's lead score should be directly related to the expected lifecycle of a lead. For example, if it normally takes 4 weeks from a lead first filling out a form for them to purchase a product, we would want to set the half life to somewhere between 8 and 12 weeks. That way the lead score won't be significantly impacted by decay during the purchasing lifecycle, but should drop off steadily thereafter.

Lead Score Time Frame

The lead score time frame is a hard limit for how recent an action needs to be in order to count towards the lead score. Its purpose is the same as decay, to make sure that leads with a high score are actually still engaged with your website / company. The time frame can be set to anything from 6 to 24 months, setting it to 6 months means that only actions within the last 6 months will be counted.

Technical Notes:

What is the difference between the different Save buttons in the Lead Score settings?

Save And Rebuild All Lead Scores:

  • This button saves the changes and tells the system to re-calculate the lead score of all contacts in the system. While this is happening, your contact's lead scores may be inaccurate (up to around 24 hours). If you have made a minor change, don't use this option.

Save:

  • This button simply saves the updated scoring criteria, but doesn't re-calculate on any of your contacts until they are updated in a way that affects their lead score, or until you click to view their lead score breakdown

When you click this button, the lead score is automatically re-calculated and you'll see a breakdown of which types of actions this lead received points for.