It’s no secret that lead scoring is important for marketers and sales teams: Two-thirds of marketers said lead scoring is important to their success, according to HubSpot’s “2013 State of Inbound Marketing” report. However, what might not be so apparent is that there’s a lot that can be done to improve how leads are scored.
A recent study from Business.com found that a third of marketers said lead scores are only “somewhat valuable,” “least valuable” or “not valuable at all,” hinting at the room for advancement in the lead-scoring process.
One possible solution is predictive lead scoring. To learn more about this approach to scoring leads, we spoke with Brian Kardon, CMO of Lattice Engines:
How would you define lead scoring, and why is it important for marketing and sales teams?
Lead scoring is simply a way to rank-order leads based on their sales-readiness. Leads with a high score can be routed directly to sales. Lower-ranking leads can be nurtured by the marketing team until they are ready to engage with sales. It’s important to understand that all leads are not created equal. Savvy marketing teams can use data and analytics to segment and prioritize leads.
In general, what do you think are the biggest mistakes or pitfalls marketers and sales make when utilizing lead scoring?
Marketers need to look at everything that is discoverable about a lead, not just the handful of attributes that are readily available. Things like hiring, patent activity, new offices, government grants and executive changes can be highly valuable in scoring leads, yet most companies do not look at these kinds of things. Marketers need to find the triggers that truly separate the buyers from the tire-kickers. For example, for a company selling CAD-CAM software the trigger might be the number of new engineers hired and the purchase of workstations. For a company selling foreign-exchange services, it might be that a prospect opened a new office in Beijing.
When it comes to lead scoring, how do you think marketers are doing these days?
Marketing organizations fall into three camps:
1) Those that have not yet implemented lead scoring: Less than 50 percent of companies with marketing automation have deployed scoring. This is partly a maturity issue, as scoring is not the first thing you would necessarily do with marketing automation. But we are also seeing companies that have been using marketing automation for several years yet are still not using lead scoring. This is a big problem and is holding back these marketing teams from improving their performance.
2) Those that are doing traditional lead scoring:
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