Pro Tip in Lead Scoring: Stop Doing it Wrong

Any marketing campaign is effective as long as it generates the right kind of B2B sales leads. Quality is the underlying principle in a lead generation program. And better revenue generation is impossible if your sales pipeline is filled with disinterested leads, entailing a waste of time and money.

Hence, an improved lead scoring system should always be considered. With one in place and implemented with marketing automation software, a business is able to pursue only high-value sales opportunities. However, some marketers are not getting it right with their lead scoring. Mistakes are often made, but they should always be analyzed and rectified to maintain business efficiency.

Howard Sewell, president of the Spear Marketing Group, has listed the common mistakes that hamper lead scoring effectiveness. If you want a more efficient marketing and sales structure, then it is high time to identify these mistakes and get your improve your lead generation program.

No separate scores for behavioral and demographic values.

Demographic scores are best thought of as how interested you are in a prospect. Behavioral scores are how interested that prospect is in you. If you only use one lead score value, there will be no easy way to distinguish between, for example, the CEO with little to no interest in your solution vs. the low-level end user with a high interest. Scoring on both demographic and behavioral attributes allows you to provide more meaningful and relevant data to sales.

Score Inflation

When you award points to a prospect for some specific behavior (e.g. visiting a Web page, attending a Webinar), that score shouldn’t last forever. The value of someone attending a Webinar last week, for example, will be much less significant say, a year from now. However, many lead scoring schemas don’t reflect that degradation of score value over time, and the result is “score inflation,” where individual prospects may ring up lead scores of one thousand points or more, by which time the score has become meaningless.

Scoring email opens

Email opens are a grossly unreliable measure of email effectiveness. An email “open” can mean many things, but more than likely does NOT mean that the individual recipient consciously opened and read your message. As such, scoring email opens not only runs the risk of assigning lead value for no valid reason, but can also contribute to score inflation (see #3, above.) Better options are to score on email click-throughs and form submissions.

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