Lead scoring is one of the most popular features in Platformly. Many users recommend it, and it has earned us a mention in the top 4 of the Capterra's Sales and Marketing Tools with built-in lead scoring. Our lead scoring abilities got us a 4.8-star rating out of 5 from our own customers, so we're proud to discuss a bit more about the feature in this article. 🌟

But what is lead scoring? There are many ways to go about it, but basically what it comes down to is attributing a value to each action a lead can perform in your sales funnel. If an action leads your user closer to conversion, it adds a positive value to your lead scoring; if let's say, the user ignores one of your emails, that will give you a negative value. Once you add up all the values from each action in your sales funnel, the result is your lead score.

With Platformly, instead of doing all of this manually, using spreadsheets and so on, you can set up your lead scoring model in a few clicks, according to your business needs. Our tool will then automatically apply your lead scoring model and attributes values to each action carried out by your leads, so you can have an estimate of how likely each lead is to purchase from you.

Lead scoring makes it easy to know which leads you should give priority to and which ones still need a bit of warming up. 🤝

1. How does Lead Scoring work

Well, when it comes to lead scoring, each company is going to have different values attributed to each action. The values that indicate whether that prospect is ready to buy or not will differ too, depending on each buyer's profile. An action that is relevant for one company may not be relevant for another company, and vice versa. 📈

This is what makes lead scoring so valuable and, at the same time, difficult to put into practice. Each business has its own targets when it comes to user interactions, so it might not be easy to create your lead scoring model. However, once done, it offers you a view of what your leads want from you and how you can help them progress along the sales funnel.

2. How to create a Lead Scoring system

To create your own lead scoring model, there are a few steps you need to go through. We'll take you through the essential phases of lead scoring system creation now. 💡

A) Determine the Characteristics of Your Personas and Segments

The first step towards a successful lead scoring system is to figure out the profile of your buyers. This ranges from demographic segmentation, such as age and gender, to other characteristics such as income, professional profile… 👨‍💻

It is essential to take into account your buyer profile in order to understand which aspects you should value and which characteristics are detrimental to the purchase. This has to be based on previous customers' profiles: you can't create a lead scoring system without having a sample. We use this sample to gather the behaviors that lead to a conversion and the user profile attached to those behaviors.

To understand your buyer profile, you should ask yourself the following questions:

• Which problem does my product solve?
• Who can benefit from my product?
• Who engages regularly with my company?
• Who purchases more often and why?
• Who is my target audience?

These questions will give you the answers you need to develop your buyer profile. Maybe your ideal buyers are Millennials; maybe they're Boomers. Maybe more women purchase from you than men. To go deeper into these profiles, ask yourself these questions about them:

• Who are they?
• What do they want?
• Where are they coming from?
• When do they engage with you the most?
• Why are they interested in you?

These few questions help you determine your segments and the characteristics of your usual buyers. Once you have defined these, you can move forward to the next step. ↪️

B) Determine the Characteristics of your Ideal Customer

Once you have defined your personas and segments, you are ready to draw a profile of your ideal customer. Lead scoring models determine sales-readiness for each of your leads and take care of turning marketing qualified leads into sales qualified ones.

If you're not sure about these concepts, marketing qualified leads are the ones that engage with your brand but are not ready to buy yet. However, they are on the path to conversion and can be nurtured to become sales qualified leads. The leads that are sales qualified, however, are the ones that are ready to buy at any moment. This means you can give them a call with your sales pitch or send them an email with your best offer. 🤑

To define your ideal customer profile, you can use explicit, implicit, and negative criteria.

Explicit criteria are easy to gather: we're talking about the job title, purchasing power, past purchases, location… This will show you whether the lead you are engaging with has purchasing power within their business, their company size, how it relates to your product, and similar characteristics.

Implicit criteria aren't as straightforward. They are things like the number of times a lead called you, the number of times they visited your website, email, and live chat interactions… These criteria are related indirectly to how interested your lead is in your product. The more engaged they are, the more interested they are. ℹ️

Negative criteria, however, can be used to evaluate when you should stop wasting your time with a specific lead. These criteria include inactivity, low engagement, low open, and clickthrough rates on your emails, unsubscribes, and similar behaviors. If your lead matches all these negative behaviors, it's time to let them go.

Through these three criteria types, you can validate your ideal buyer persona. This persona will be at the intersection of goals and demands, objections and behaviors, pain points, and challenges.

After this customer profile is defined, you can proceed with the next step: assigning points to each action.

C) Create your Point System

As we mentioned previously, each lead scoring model is unique. You need to figure out the actions that are the most important to you and the ones that are not relevant or detrimental. You can, as an example, attribute ten points to a user that downloaded a white paper on your product. If a user unsubscribes from your newsletter, you subtract ten points from them, and so on for every possible action or touchpoint.

You can also attribute points for characteristics of your users: let's say you give a user five points for being the CEO of his company. Or more, because you know that the user is in a position to make decisions when it comes to purchasing your product or service. 👇

This is an example of a possible lead scoring model:

Usually, these models go from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the more likely it is for that lead to purchase.

Once you have figured out your point system, you need to pick a value from which it is worth it to pursue that lead, another value for leads that need nurturing, and a value that indicates you should drop that lead.

Now that you know the basics of lead scoring, we'll list a few lead scoring best practices. 💎

3. Lead Scoring Tips

The first thing we recommend is to make sure your model is tried and proven before you implement it on a large scale. Your ideal customer profile has to stand on facts and be tested on a small sample before you can use it on all your leads.

Even then, you can always improve your lead scoring system with new information, so we recommend analyzing your customer profile constantly. 👨 👩

Also, you should make sure that you are going to use the information your lead scoring provides you. If you know a lead has a 30% chance of buying from you and another one has a 5% chance, will you treat these leads differently? If the answer is “no”, then lead scoring is of no use to you.

Lead scoring is especially important for eCommerce sales. You can use the information you have on your users to segment them and tailor your messages precisely according to what those users are looking for. 🔎

So you should make sure that your lead scoring model matches your business values, that you base your model on actual data from actual customers, that you put that information to work for you, and that you use lead scoring data to segment and personalize your messages. Simple, right?

4. Lead Scoring on Platformly

On Platformly, lead scoring can be set up with just a few clicks. Once you have your lead scoring rules added, you will be able to view each lead's score based on their interactions with your brand. If you want to check lead scoring for your leads, all you have to do is open the contact tab and you get the score for all your contacts:

Once you open one of your contacts, you can see the score again and other data as well:

This makes it a lot easier to keep track of the leads that are likely to buy and drop the ones that are just wasting your time. As you can see, our lead scoring feature is easy to set up and easy to understand! If you have any questions, please check this lead scoring help article.

Wrap Up

In conclusion, lead scoring is a great way to qualify your leads. Giving each lead a score makes it easy to segment those leads to make sure each lead gets the right message at the right time. ⏳

Segmentation is an important step towards personalization, and that's one of the things lead scoring can help you achieve. Using Platformly, it's easy to get a score for each lead in your CRM that will tell you how much this lead is worth for your business.

Once you have that data, you can make sure you nurture the right leads and ignore those who are unlikely to purchase. This will save you time and help you allocate your resources to where they are needed.

Do you think lead scoring could help your business? Subscribe to Platformly and get this included feature with zero hassle. We promise you'll never want to look back!