The Top Lead Scoring Tip from the Marketo User Summit

by Jason Stewart

I gave a presentation on lead scoring last week at the Marketo User Summit in San Mateo. Aside from some general background on the differences between demographic scoring (based on things that can be gleaned from a web form like title, department, company size, etc.) and behavioral scoring (based on actions a prospect takes or web pages a prospect visits) I gave a few examples of one-off or periodic lead scoring activities that fall outside of these parameters.

Some of my tips can be found in these previous blog posts, Lead Scoring Should Influence Your Web Forms and Capturing That Shy Prospect.

The number one tip that people spoke to me about after the event has to do with the way that Salesforce.com works, but even if you don't use SFDC your CRM/SFA system might work the same way. When a new prospect fills out a form or gets loaded into Salesforce.com, they usually enter the system as a lead. Once a lead makes a purchase or engages with your sales team in some way, the salesperson has the option to create a sales opportunity to help with forecasting, monitor the sales cycle and track potential revenue.

When a lead is engaged with sales enough to be associated with an opportunity they are converted to what is called a contact. So, for arguments sake, consider a lead to be a prospect and a contact to be either a customer or a highly engaged prospect.

If a lead has been in your system for long enough to have been a part of numerous marketing campaigns (or opportunities to gain lead scoring points based on their behavior) but still hasn't shown enough promise to be converted to a contact, then a lead scoring adjustment should be considered.

At Demandbase, if we have been marketing to a lead for a year and they are still a lead (not a contact), then there is a significant lead scoring penalty. Nothing so severe that they cannot recover, but enough that they need to participate in a fair number of lead scoring behaviors before they can reach the threshold for sales notification via lead scoring alert.

Comments

[Jodi]

This tip is good but the issue really b/w lead and contact in SFDC is the fact that you can't have multiple leads under an account. Becuase we sell to many different roles and departments within an organization we work on the account level which means that every lead gets converted to a contact if it falls under an account. Any tips for scoring based on this??

[Jason Stewart]

Great point Jodi ... obviously this tip wouldn't work if you are operating exclusively from the contacts and accounts tabs instead of the leads tab. One of the benefits of SFDC is having the option to do just that, unlike a other CRM or SFA systems that are contact-centric rather than account-centric. My tip in that type of situation would be to set up some sort of behavioral trigger, maybe if there is no change to their lead score over a certain period of time (meaning they are not clicking on your emails or visiting your web site or responding to your marketing efforts in any way) then you could deduct points....

[John]

Jason...if someone is already a lead in SalesForce and they come into the system again, what do they come in as? Another lead? Campaign Member?