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If you want new methods to increase leads and boost sales productivity, then you need to introduce lead scoring into your sales strategy.
HubSpot is one of the leading platforms when it comes to lead scoring and is guaranteed to help take your sales strategy to the next level.
Here are four best practices to follow to help you ace your lead scoring using HubSpot…
- Using consumer demographics to score your leads.
- Using consumer behaviour to score your leads.
- Remember to use negative scores.
- The lead scoring matrix.
1. Use consumer demographics to score your leads
Consumer demographics separate your target market into specific, accessible groups of people. It’s based on personal attributes like geography, age, education, occupation and income.
Companies can gather these types of information to determine whether contacts are a good (or bad fit) for their business. This allows you to create targeted marketing campaigns catered towards different segments within your database.
One of the easiest ways to attain these kinds of information is by using forms on your website. By providing specified fields and designating which of these are required, you can ensure your web visitors are giving you the information you need.
The best way to convince someone to fill out one of your forms is by creating downloadable content which offers really high value. This blog from HubSpot highlights 20 types of content which are guaranteed to work well on your website.
Here are some good examples of consumer demographics which you may want to start scoring within your HubSpot account:
- Industry.
- Age.
- Job title.
- Company size.
- Revenue.
Let’s say someone fills out a form on your website and states that they work in the fashion industry. You may already know that 75% of your company’s revenue comes from this industry. This contact would then receive a positive score within your account.
So, that’s demographics covered - now let’s discuss using buyer behaviour to score your leads.
2. Use consumer behaviour to score your leads
HubSpot also allows you to score your contacts by analysing how they interact with your brand’s different mediums. These include metrics such as page views, email engagement and social behaviours.
For example, you may send out five emails to a prospect and they end up opening all of them. Boom. In this kind of scenario, you should always score the contact positively to ensure that you’ve tracked this behaviour.
Behavioural scoring will make up the majority of each contact’s overall score. They can only be scored once for providing you with a job title. However, they’ll be scored every time they perform an action which could potentially happen quite often.
One thing to keep in mind when setting up your behavioural lead scoring is that not every action should be awarded the same amount of points. There’s a big difference between someone opening an email and someone downloading your pricing guide.
I’ll discuss how you can devise a successful lead scoring criteria later on in this blog.
3. Remember to use negative scoring
Yes, you should always reward positive consumer behaviour. But please, please make sure that you use negative lead scoring as well.
A customer’s mind can change in the blink of an eye. One day they’re engaging with all of your content. The next, they’ve unsubscribed from all your communications and marked your email as spam.
If something like this happens, the contact’s score needs to decrease. Your sales reps will be under a false impression that this person may still be interested if not - and this could lead to them wasting lots of valuable time.
Here are some other actions which you should be scoring negatively:
- Criticising your brand on social media.
- Visiting your careers page.
- Regularly ignoring your email communications.
Negative lead scoring is something which companies regularly forget to do. The impacts of doing so can be really harmful to your sales strategy. Avoid making the same mistakes by ensuring you’ve implemented negative lead scoring into your strategy.
4. Have a lead scoring matrix
To make a success of lead scoring, it’s important to determine a criteria that will be used to calculate the sections which I’ve mentioned above.
Once you’ve decided what types of elements you want to score, you’ll need to establish some scoring thresholds. The most common scale which people tend to use is 0-10.
However, it’s completely up to you when deciding on your number scale. You might want to go 0-50 or you might want to go 0-100. As long as you and your sales team understand your number scale, it doesn’t really matter.
Bear in mind that your lead scoring scale needs to be consistent. If you use a 1-100 scale for your positive scores, you should use a 1-100 scale for your negative scores too.
Understanding how lead scoring works is crucial to achieving success using HubSpot. You also need to be clued up on other areas such as building landing pages, importing contacts and editing forms.
Our brand new guide has all the answers.
Take your lead scoring skills up a notch with our exclusive guide
Lead scoring is just one important part of your Sales Hub. You need to be clued up on other areas such as deals, setting sales goals, building internal sales workflows and much more. Our new guide can help you with all of these.
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