Lead Scoring allows you to give each of your contacts a score that shows how likely they are to close into a customer. The higher the score, the more likely a contact in your database will drive revenue for your company.
It is extremely helpful for both marketing and sales teams to prioritize their time. Marketing knows exactly what leads to pass along to sales and which leads they need to nurture further. Sales knows who to prioritize based on how high the score is. Sounds simple, right?
Sixty-eight percent of B2B companies do lead scoring, yet only 40 percent of salespeople get value from it. (SiriusDecisions) If it's so simple, why is it not providing value to more people?
Even though the idea of lead scoring sounds great, it is actually extremely hard to implement. First, you have to figure out all of the criteria that goes into a lead score. What information do you have about the contacts in your database that makes that more likely or less likely to become a customer? It may not be every single piece of information they have given to you, but there are definitely some that are more important than others. Once you identify this information, you need to figure out how much to weigh each piece of criteria. For example, if you know someone is more likely to become a customer if they give you a work email address versus a gmail.com or yahoo.com email address, how many more points do you want to assign to their lead score? 2? 5? 10?
For the marketers who want to do lead scoring, it can be difficult if not impossible to figure out where to start. And that's why we are introducing Predictive Lead Scoring.
Getting Started
To run your predictive lead score, you must be an Enterprise customers. Here are some other guidelines to keep in mind:
- You have been storing both engaged and unengaged contacts in HubSpot.
- You have been marking contacts as customers for at least three months.
- You have at least 500 contacts in HubSpot that are marked as Customers.
- You have at least twice as many contacts who are marked as non-customers.
Please note: these are general guidelines and may differ between HubSpot accounts.
If you are a Basic or Professional customer and fit criteria 2-4 above, you can try out Predictive Lead Scoring using an Enterprise Trial.
If you do not fit into the criteria above, we will provide a default model based on patterns we have identified from running the tailored predictive lead scores across customers with good data. Though it won't use personalized account information such as IP country, state, or business type, it will give you a head start to using lead scoring.
When you are ready to run your lead score, go to Contacts Home > Lead Scoring. At the top of the page you will see a section for Manual Lead Scoring and a section for Predictive Lead Scoring. Click on the Predictive Lead Scoring tab.
We will then walk you through all of the criteria listed above to make sure you are a good fit for predictive lead scoring. If you are a good fit, we will then let you run your predictive lead score with the click of a button. Depending on the number of contacts you have in your database, this may take up to 48 hours. If you are not a good fit, we will let you know why.
After the predictive lead score runs, we will notify you that you are all set. You can also see that we have broken your leads down into 3 buckets: low lead scores, medium lead scores, and high lead scores.
- Low Lead Scores - Make sure to not delete any of your leads with low lead scores. They are critical to running predictive lead scoring. Without them, we won't be able to compare the attributes that do not make someone a fit for your company.
- Medium Lead Scores - Set up a social stream in Social Inbox that monitors this group of contacts. You can interact with them, nurture them, and hopefully move them into the high lead scores bucket.
- High Lead Scores - Set up an email series in the Workflows App with the contacts in this bucket. You will want to let your sales team know that they have a high likelihood to close!
You will then see a pie chart broken up into behavior, company information, spam, email engagement, social engagement, and demographic information. This shows you how much each of the attributes in each category have been weighted.
If you take a look below the pie chart, you will see the most influential attributes broken into the top five positive attributes and top five negative attributes.
If you click into a piece of the pie, the attributes below will change based on the category you select. For example, if you click into the behavior slice of the pie, you will see the attributes below change to show the top 5 positive and negative behavioral attributes.
Now, let's dive into the five ways predictive lead scoring can improve your marketing.
#1. Strengthening Your Smarketing Relationship
One of the benefits of using predictive lead scoring is how it will improve your relationship with your sales team. Your sales team wants as many leads as possible, but they do not want to spend timing calling leads who will never turn into customers. Once you implement predictive lead scoring, you will not need to send leads to sales until they are more likely to purchase. You can immediately send them the leads with high leads scores but wait on the medium or lower lead scores until they have been nurtured more and may be more likely to purchase. Not only is it a more effective use of sales' time, but it will help you as the marketer segment your database for any marketing campaigns you plan to run.
You can also run a report to see who owns the most qualified leads in your database and if there are any you should re-assign. If you have one sales rep who follows up and closes qualified leads, that's a good sign that he or she should be given these leads. If you have another sales rep who doesn't follow up with the leads who have been identified as qualified, it may be time to reassign that person's leads to someone else.
#2. Notifying Your Sales Team in Real-Time
If someone falls into the top 10% of your database and has a high lead score, it is important that your sales team knows right away. Set up a workflow to send an internal email notification to the sales rep that owns each lead who has a high predictive lead score. You can let them know what the lead score is and even show them in the Predictive Lead Scoring App what information was taken into account to make them a good fit for your company. Your sales team will be able to take immediate action with this group of highly qualified leads.
#3. Nurturing the Right Contacts
Not everyone will have a high lead score. Some contacts may not ever have a high lead score. However, there may be some that you can nurture into that high lead score category.
Take a look at the positive attributes that make up your predictive lead score. If you see a piece of content that was viewed or a marketing channel that you used for the promotion, that may be something that you can use in a nurturing campaign. For example, if you see that one of your positive attributes is a certain piece of content or viewing at least five pages on your website, you know that you have to get that piece of content in front of your contacts that do not have high lead scores and/or get them to view more pages on your website.
Each contact's Predictive Lead Score will be shown on their contact record. This also means that you can create lists based on the Predictive Lead Score. Build out a list based on the medium or low Predictive Lead Scores. Use the Email App or Workflow App to communicate with them about the piece of content that you know is more likely to get someone to convert.
The piece of content example is just one way you can nurture them. Take a look at these attributes and try to think of ways you can get your contacts to take the actions that would increase their predictive lead score. As they take these actions, their lead score will update. If they cross over into the high lead score category, you can send the right to sales.
#4. Using Social Monitoring Streams to Connect
Besides nurturing emails, you can also set up social monitoring streams to interact with your contacts. Set up streams based on contacts who fall into the low lead score and medium lead score category. You can then use social media to try to get them to take an action that you know will increase their lead score. For example, if you see them talking about a certain topic or conversation and can fit a helpful piece of content into the conversation, do that. Or simply interact with them, ask them questions, answer their questions, or generally be helpful.
#5. Reporting Based on Predictive Lead Score
Because your Predictive Lead Score is a Contact Property, you can build reports to analyze your Predictive Lead Scores. Use the Contacts Report to see how your Contacts are growing over time broken down by Predictive Lead Score. You will then be able to see how many contacts are falling into the different categories. You can also create a list of your highest lead scores and run an Attribution Report to see the most valuable content they have interacted with before converting to a customer. Remember since your Predictive Lead Score is a contact property, you can get creative with your reporting.
