Accelerate growth with lead scoring
Lead scoring can be a polarizing topic for some-either you've used it (with horrible results), or you've never heard of it before.
In today's post, we'll cover what lead scoring is, how it can help to increase revenue and align your teams, and how Breadcrumbs uses HubSpot to pave the way to a new and improved version of lead scoring.
Let's get started!
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is the method of assigning points to contacts or potential prospects based on how closely they resemble your buyer persona. The higher the score, the more likely the lead is to be a good fit for your product or service.
Scoring criteria can include firmographic data (company size and revenue), demographic data (job title, location), and offline or online activity (website activity, product usage, demos, etc.). Contact information can be gathered by lead generation forms, data enrichment services, or imported from product data.
These data points are then gathered together to create what's called a lead scoring model. Based on this model, leads are then scored based on the selected attributes.
How can lead scoring benefit your business
There's one huge misconception when it comes to lead scoring:
It's only useful for sales teams.
In reality, lead scoring not only helps to sift your good leads from the duds, but it also aligns your marketing and sales teams on what makes a candidate a good pick in the first place.
By being able to hone-in on your ideal customer profile, you'll be able to:
- Increase your close rate rate. By finding more qualified leads the moment they’re ready to buy, your sales team will have a better chance of increasing their deal close rate and meeting their revenue goals.
- Shorten your sales cycle. By knowing when to reach out to your best leads, your scoring efforts will allow you to close deals faster.
- Create high-converting content. Learning what resonates more with your high-converting prospects ensures you’re equipped to create more targeted content to convert more leads.
At the end of the day, it's important to know that no two leads are precisely the same regardless of their origin.
Lead scoring helps to isolate and promote these differences so sales and marketing better understand who they will be communicating with and what their approach should be.
The problem with traditional lead scoring
After reading the benefits, it's hard to imagine why anyone wouldn't be successful with lead scoring. However, a series of issues have been setting up marketing and sales teams for failure so far:
- Most solutions are black boxes or arbitrary calculations that don't really get the job done
- Most models are treated as one-and-done but companies strategic priorities evolve in time
- Not every datapoint matters in the same way, but there’s little visibility on which is which
- Models often don’t behave as intended, but no one really knows since they’re locked into the aforementioned black boxes
- Most models don't really make it easy to work with interactions’ timeliness
- On top of all that, building homegrown models takes months to deliver anything relevant
These issues bundled together almost ensure that your lead scoring models are destined to fail.
How Breadcrumbs uses HubSpot to create lead scoring 2.0
It's no secret that HubSpot's ecosystem includes native integrations with some of the best software on the market today. Combined with its own native sales tools and intuitive platform, it's hard to go wrong with such an all-encompassing tool.
This makes it a perfect platform for lead scoring 2.0.
At Breadcrumbs, we believe that every visitor, lead, opportunity, and customer leaves a trail of breadcrumbs.
Our no-code connectors will ingest and unify your existing marketing, sales, product, and CX data that you have inside HubSpot and your entire GTM stack to generate a 360° view that serves as the foundation for scoring success.
Our quick and visual ML-assisted model builder enriched by always-on analytics enables model creation and iteration within hours rather than months of work, surfacing insights and recommendations on what matters most in real-time.
After scoring your leads, you can then use HubSpot's automation tools to turn scores into actionable results by:
- Automating workflows to tag MQLs and PQLs
- Routing priority leads to the right team members
- Creating niche segments in marketing automation
With a lead scoring model in place, your sales and marketing teams can get deep, meaningful insights—not vanity metrics—about the quality of leads entering and progressing through your funnel.
How to get started with lead scoring
While the process of creating lead scoring models can seem arduous, the truth is that you only need a few data points to get started. Better yet, all of this data is already in HubSpot—you just need to put all the pieces together first.
- Define your ideal customer profile by finding the attributes that typically lead to higher sales. This can be things like demographics (job title, firmographics, company size, location, etc).
- Find the actions that lead to better conversions. These are typically high-intent signals like case study downloads, pricing page visits, or multiple email opens.
- Combine these two into a lead scoring model.
After you’ve created your scoring model and assigned point values, you can use Breadcrumbs to put that model into action and rank the leads in your database. Breadcrumbs will then re-route these scores back into HubSpot for you to use with their native automated sequences.
By creating your own lead scoring system, you'll be well on your way to breaking down interdepartmental silos and creating a path towards revenue acceleration.
If you want an in-depth guide to creating your first scoring model, you can download our free Lead Scoring for Acquisition eBook here.
