Lead Scoring Best Practices
Lead Scoring methods vary greatly from customer to customer, which is why we built our Lead Score Rulesets to be as flexible as possible.
However the values you give to each desirable attribute and behavior are largely arbitrary. They need to represent how important each item is as well as be weighed against the other attributes and behaviors you’re scoring on to decide what a reasonable value is for each.
The first thing to decide will be the criteria you’re scoring on, and it helps to do this by rule category (Contact, Activity, Engagement).
Remember that Contact Score rules only grant points once, so you’ll use these for static attributes like job title, geographic location, whether or not they have an email address/phone number, possibly List Membership, etc. Identify some desirable attributes that you’re looking for in a qualified lead. Next, move on to general activity:
- Will you be scoring on email opens, clicks, visits to the website based on a campaign email?
- Will the point values always be the same, or will it vary by campaign?
- Are there certain pages of the website that are more important than others?
- Will you be granting more points for a longer visit, more page views, how they got to the website?
Finally, think about what you’d consider to be “engagement.”
- Will it be hitting your landing pages, submitting your forms?
- Other areas of the website that talk about your value proposition?
- Downloading certain assets?
Two additional things that also help with the above process:
- Getting your Sales team & Marketing team together to discuss what attributes and behaviors make up a “qualified lead”
- Looking at the tracked history of your recently closed deals to see what attributes and behaviors they exhibited (the latter of which usually requires a month or two on Paminga to build that history)
Once you have an idea of what you’ll be scoring on and how important each item is then you can start thinking about the Lead Qualification Threshold. Is 100 points achievable based on how many rules you have and how many points they’re granting? Is it too high or too low? Do you want to mark any rules as required so that a contact will have to meet them to be considered qualified, like having an email address and/or phone number?
Keep in mind too that Lead Scoring is not set in stone; you can and will be making adjustments as you go along, which is why we always suggest running a “test” ruleset in parallel with your “live” rulset. While changing rule point values does not retroactively re-score your contacts, you may find it necessary if you’ve accidentally given contacts an “exploit” so they’re accruing a ton of lead score without putting in much effort.
