As businesses strive to generate more leads and increase revenue, lead scoring has become a crucial aspect of sales and marketing strategies. By assigning values to leads based on their level of engagement, businesses can prioritize their efforts and focus on leads that are most likely to convert. However, choosing the right lead scoring model for your business can be challenging.

At Be Bold, we understand that every business is unique, and a one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it. That’s why, in this blog, we dive into various lead scoring models and provide hands-on tips on how to select the model that suits your business needs. 🚀

First things first, what is lead scoring?

As a business owner or marketer, generating leads is likely one of your top priorities. But not all leads are created equal, and it can be difficult to determine which leads are worth pursuing and which are not. This is where lead scoring comes in. Lead scoring is a methodology that assigns a numerical value to each lead based on their level of engagement and readiness to buy. By implementing a lead scoring model, businesses can focus their resources on.

What are the attributes of a successful lead scoring model

Practical and scalable

A successful model is practical and scalable, designed for your specific business, leads, and pipeline, implemented without marketing and sales needing to score every single lead interaction. A practical and scalable lead scoring model allows you to funnel the right leads to the right people.

The result of teamwork between marketing and sales  🤝

Lead scoring can help your sales team close more deals by identifying the best leads to pursue. However, it will only be as effective if your sales team is on board with the lead scoring system. That’s why it’s crucial to include your sales organization’s leaders in the discussion around lead scoring. By getting their input on what factors are most important to them, you can create a system that works for everyone involved, which will help your sales team close more deals. 

Data you can collect to build your lead scoring model

Demographic information

By including questions about demographic factors on your page forms, you can use this gathered data to score leads on how well they fit your buyer persona

Company information

Suppose you want to build a lead scoring model for a B2B company that considers company information. In that case, you can include questions about company size, type, and industry on your landing page forms. This way, the gathered data can be used to score leads based on how well they fit your target market.  

Online behavior

Track how leads interact with your website by build a system that considers online behavior. For example, you can track which offers they download, how many pages they visit, and how long they spend on your site.

Email engagement

If someone has signed up to receive emails from your company, it needs to be clarified how interested that person is in purchasing from you. However, open- and click-through rates give you a good idea of their level of interest, your sales team will want to know who opened every email in your lead nurturing series or who always clicks through on your promotional emails. This way, you can focus on the people who seem the most engaged. 

Social engagement

A lead’s engagement level with a brand on social media can indicate their interest. How often they click on tweets and Facebook posts or retweet or share those posts can provide valuable insights. 

Examples of lead scoring models

Model 1: Website visitor scoring

The website visitor lead scoring model is a lead-scoring method used to identify sales leads from users who visit your website. By scoring leads based on which parts of your site they interact with and their general behaviors, you can value actions that show they’re interested in your product. Examples of those actions are visiting your pricing page or providing their email address. You can give leads a lower score if they take actions that show they’re less interested, like reading a blog post or clicking your “about” page. 

Model 2: Suitability and activity

The suitability and activity model is a way of determining how good of a fit a potential customer is for your company and how interested they are. The model looks at the frequency a person has interacted with the company’s website. A lead who is a good fit and has interacted a lot is more likely to convert into a customer than someone who is not a good fit and has not interacted much. Some leads are in between, like those who are not a great fit but are interested.

Model 3: B2B lead scoring model

This model is a lead scoring method that gives more value to leads with high authority to make purchasing decisions. A vice president will get more points than an HR manager. This model is ideal for B2B lead generation because it targets specific job titles, departments, and business types. 

Model 4: email engagement 

Email engagement is a method that assesses a lead’s engagement with your email campaigns. Factors being considered include the open rate, the number of click-throughs, the number of people who haven’t responded to numerous emails, and more.  You can use that information to improve future campaigns and increase the number of qualified leads you generate. 

As we mentioned before, every business needs are unique, and a one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it. We often combine different aspects of these lead scoring models to create a solution tailored to your needs. For example, marketing automation solutions like ActiveCampaign and Adobe Marketo offer lead scorings models based on engagement in email campaigns, demographic data, website behavior and more.

Are you looking for help implementing a lead scoring model tailored to your needs? Don’t hesitate to contact one of our marketing automation strategists.