The term Lead Scoring in the marketing automation space can be a bit confusing for Dynamics users. This is because CRM systems like Microsoft Dynamics have records for individuals named Leads and Contacts. For the purposes of this post, we'll just talk about scoring and it will refer to any individual. That works a lot better when talking about ClickDimensions because our solution actually scores Leads, Contacts and Anonymous Visitors, the latter being a ClickDimensions custom entity.
With the introduction of our new Score Models, we will no longer be applying further improvements, enhancements, or fixes for the legacy scoring system. We are working to ensure that the new Score Models cover the same functionality while also providing some new features, so we highly recommend that you consider migrating to the new Lead Scoring if you have not already.
Goals
- Learn about the distinction between scoring and grading
- Learn about aggregate scoring for an account
Scoring
Scoring specifically refers to the interest level of the individual (i.e. Lead, Contact or Anonymous Visitor). This is because the score is calculated based on email clicks, web form submissions, visits, page views, link clicks and file downloads. The more someone clicks on your emails and visits your site, the more interested they probably are. To see where you can find this information within Dynamics click here. However, their level of interest doesn't mean they are a good prospect for you. That is where grading comes in.
Grading
Lead grading is the right term for the 'fit of the individual. You can define fit in a number of ways. Depending on the complexity of your product/service line, someone who is a fit for one product/service may not be a good fit for another. Fit can be based off of both demographic (e.g. a person's title) and firmographic (e.g. a firm's industry) attributes. Referring to the graphic in this post, for our prospects a good fit is someone whose company uses Dynamics and whose role involves marketing. In addition, if the company is a high-tech company, then it'll tend to be even more suited to our solution because high-tech companies are early adopters of marketing technology. So, when we see someone with these attributes and a high lead score, we drop everything we're doing and sell. If you have a lot of prospect volume, Dynamics' Filter tool can be a great way to pull out which Leads/Contacts fit your criteria. Sort by score (i.e. interest) and you've got a nice, prioritized list.
How we use our scoring
Internally, we've tweaked our default scoring values to a weight that is right for us. Email link clicks are high value so they get 10 points each by default. Likewise, form submissions are worth 25 points. Each visit is worth 5 points. Page views are worth 3 points each but all of our product tour pages are custom set to 5 (except for the main tour page which is 10) and our overview video is worth 15. When someone passes 50 points, they are interested. When they hit 100, it is time to really give them attention.
Summarizing interest at the organization level
If you are a B2B company, which most Dynamics users are, then you might be asking yourself if we should look at the score at the overall organization level. Well, we do. Since our solution also scores Anonymous Visitors and since we correlate all visits (anonymous and identified) at the organization level (i.e. at the IP address level), we can often see a bigger picture of interest being generated from a single organization. For example, there may be 5 different people interacting with us (i.e. with our emails, web site and blog) from one organization but we'll see that activity grouped in a single place (i.e on our IP Organization records). So, we can sell with confidence knowing the overall organization is clearly interested. This is informative and encouraging. We are no longer flying blind wondering who is interested, what they are interested in and how interested they may be.