Overview

Lead scoring is a methodology used by Sales and Marketing teams to assign lead quality scores to potential customers. The score reflects the likelihood of that lead becoming a paying customer.

Lead scoring models incorporate both explicit and implicit data. Explicit data is information by or about the prospect (i.e. company size, industry segment, job title, or location). Implicit data is derived from monitoring prospect behavior (i.e. website visits, whitepaper downloads, or email opens and clicks).

Lead scoring allows your teams to spend their time where it counts most: Following-up with qualified leads.

Lead scoring has additional benefits:

• Increased Sales and Marketing Alignment. When your organization has a defined process for scoring leads, you can ensure that Marketing only passes qualified leads to Sales. This strengthens the relationship between the two departments and facilitates better alignment.
• More Effective Marketing Campaigns. Lead scoring allows you to identify the campaigns and channels that result in high-quality leads so you can then tailor your marketing strategy to generate more qualified leads and cut marketing efforts that drive low-quality leads. This results in higher ROI per lead.
• Increase in Revenue. With lead scoring in place, the Sales department prioritizes which leads to follow up with first. Reaching out to qualified leads in a timely manner results in higher conversion rates and increased company revenue.

Use Case

Census can pass your lead scores to your sales and marketing teams so they can use it in their own tools. Not sure how to get started scoring leads? Here's an example of how we ourselves at Census assign our leads into three buckets based on their behavior and then transfer this lead data to our teams so they can act upon it.

A sales qualified lead is a prospective customer that has been deemed ready to talk to a sales team. Typically, this lead has expressed some amount of interest in your product or service, which indicates that they're ready to move into the sales process. 

Let’s focus on Product Qualified Leads (PQL). A PQL is a lead who has experienced value from using your product as a result of a free trial, use of a limited set of features, or other types of first-hand experience with your product.

By the time you reach out to a PQL, they should have already experienced meaningful value from your product. This simplifies the sales process because the prospect already understands the product's value, and there is no need to sell the user on it. 

The hands-on use of the product takes it a step further than a marketing qualified lead (MQL).

Start by analyzing your lead data. What activities qualify the lead? Here at Census, we categorize PQLs during a trial as follows:

• Multiple users join the organization; this indicates broader interest.
• The user has successfully connected their data warehouse. This indicates that the user has data warehouse permissions and is, therefore, a qualified buyer.
• If the user creates scheduled syncs, this indicates intent for Census to be part of their data stack and that they have an understanding of the tool.
• If a user repeatedly fails to complete an activity, we can intervene via a support case.

Based on the above implicit data, we decide if the user becomes a PQL. Then, we analyze the explicit data about the organization to decide if the Free or Paid business tier is the right fit.

Finally, we send the data from the data warehouse to HubSpot using Census’s reverse ETL. Inside HubSpot, the Sales Team takes action!