We all want more leads. Not only do we want more leads, but we also wish to have quality leads. That is why we go through all of the marketing and sales alignment, all of the persona development and all of the research to target the right people at the right time.
Once all of that hard work takes place, you’ve determined who you want to target, and you create a beautiful eBook with a landing page that will convert better than any landing page, ever.
You create emails to nurture leads that download your eBook so you can eventually convert them to marketing qualified leads and pass them to sales.
Everything is perfect. You’ve vetted everything out, and you launch your lead generation campaign, viola, you’re done! It is time to sit back, relax, and let the leads flow.
Well, sure, all of that is true. You put the hard work in, and you probably created a highly converting lead generation machine. That doesn’t mean you have done everything you can do to generate leads.
As we all know, sometimes people don’t love dishing out their personal information on the internet. Maybe you got them to download your eBook, requesting only their email address and first name, but that isn’t enough to consider someone marketing qualified to pass to sales.
Uncovering qualified leads can be incredibly powerful and transformational for marketing and sales teams. That is where lead scoring comes in.
What is Lead Scoring?
As explained in our previous article, lead scoring is the process of identifying the best leads for your sales team to connect with by attaching values to your leads individually based on a strategic scoring system.
While it may seem that lead scoring is excluding a group of leads and focusing on another. Rather, lead scoring is a way to help your marketing and sales teams align and determine which leads are sales-ready.
Lead scoring allows you to uncover leads that may be worth sales talking to, even though they didn’t check all of the boxes to be considered a marketing qualified lead.
By applying a value to every interaction someone can take with your company, you can start painting a picture of who are your most valuable leads, even if they haven’t filled out forms for you. Lead scoring is a way to quantify actions taken by prospects and judge their behavior in terms of value for your company.
HubSpot Makes Lead Scoring Easy
With all of the information stored in HubSpot, you can add a score to almost anything. Some of the key areas in which you can set up lead scoring are demographic information, email interaction, online behavior, company information, and social engagement. Let's break those down.
Demographic Information: If you sell to multiple areas but focus on one city or geographic area, in particular, you can associate a higher lead score to that area. Conversely, if you do not want to sell to a specific area, you can associate a negative lead score to leads who are in said area.
Email Interaction: If someone has opted out of your emails, they are likely uninterested in hearing from your company, you could apply a negative score to these people. Positive scores, on the other hand, can be associated with people who have opened multiple emails or clicked on important links within the email. Even if they didn't reply or fill out your marketing qualified lead form, you could pass them to sales based on their level of engagement with the content you are sending them.
Online Behavior: How a potential lead interacts with your website can tell you a lot about if they're actually interested in buying from you. If you can identify actions that indicate a high likelihood to cause a lead to close as a customer, you can associate a positive score to these leads. For example, perhaps product page views are more valuable than merely visiting the home page. Conversely, you can consider the contacts who have stopped visiting your site, these people could likely be no longer interested, and you can take points away from their lead score.
Company Information: If you are selling B2B, you have specific criteria for businesses you would like to work with. You can associate different levels of points for certain company information. For example, you can add points to companies that are in the industries you would like to work with or have the ideal amount of employees.
Social Engagement: Interactions with your company on social media can be a great indicator of how interested a lead is in working with you. You can associate points to any social media interaction. Perhaps if they have retweet multiple tweets in the last month, or engaged with the majority of your Facebook posts, you can add points to their lead score.
How To Set Up Lead Scoring In HubSpot
To set up lead scoring in HubSpot, it is best to have Professional or Enterprise accounts with HubSpot so you can leverage the HubSpot Score property within the system. This property allows you to add and subtract scores based on all of the actions outlined above.
Setting it up in the system is pretty easy to do.
- Within HubSpot, click on the “Settings” icon in the upper right-hand corner of your screen.
- Navigate to the “Properties” section of your settings then find the contact property named “HubSpot Score.”
Once you are in the property, you will see at the bottom of your screen where you can add positive or negative attributes.
This is the point at which you need to determine what makes someone a better fit or a worse fit as a potential customer. Begin associating points based on these actions.
It is best to have a scale that you decide to follow through the entire process. For example, if you choose the best score someone can get is 100, then you may determine anyone with a score above 70 is worth reaching out to.
Begin adding positive and negative attributes until you have covered all of the actions you can think of.
You have plenty of criteria to base these scores within HubSpot, make sure to think through everything you can thoroughly.
- Set your attributes, then click ‘Done.’ To add additional criteria, click ‘AND’. By doing that, leads will have to meet all criteria in order for the attribute to apply.
- To change the number of points that are added or removed when a lead meets the criteria of the attribute, click on “Edit”. Enter the new score amount and click “Set”.
Remember, marketing and businesses are always changing and evolving. Don’t forget to update your lead scoring criteria monthly continually!
In the end, you should have a pretty comprehensive list of scoring criteria. HubSpot will start automatically tracking this for each contact.
The next thing you need to do is determine how you will leverage this information. The first step is creating an active list in HubSpot.
Since you have determined what lead score indicates someone you should follow up with, create a list segmenting the people above that score.
From here, you can enroll these leads into a workflow to send them emails or trigger tasks for sales reps to follow up on them!
So there you have it, from start to finish you can create a lead scoring strategy that allows you to uncover leads that may be hidden in your HubSpot account.
The more leads uncovered, the higher chance of closing them into customers.
Remember always to update your criteria as your business evolves, so you never miss an opportunity to gain a new customer.
