4 signs to know that your lead scoring program is working

Question

Getting the science of how your buyers engage with you is key for making revenue generation more predictable. We have worked with many sales and marketing organizations who look to putting in a lead scoring system to better qualify which leads should go to sales, validate that online campaigns are influencing MQL production and to make sales people more efficient. Regardless of whether you are testing the scoring methodology within marketing or have a system that is in place, I wanted to share 4 tips to highlight how you can determine if your current system is working before you make any changes.
Eloqua RPIs are moving in the right direction. Value, Reach, Conversion, Velocity, Return are Eloqua's revenue performance indicators and there is a connection between the output of your scoring system and each indicator. Ensuring that you have a process for scoring leads in your marketing database (reach), monitoring the speed (velocity) at which they move through funnel (conversion), will give you a sense of how well your system is performing and its impact on revenue generation. Value and Return will become clear once you have seen enough scored contacts flow through buying cycles to become customers in order for those to become clear.
Your top ranked leads outperform the other categories. Measuring fit and engagement are among the best practices for building a sound lead scoring system. Fit includes all of the firmographic pieces of information that your buyer gives you or can be appended via Eloqua's AppCloud. Engagement speaks to Digital Body Language or their online buying behavior. You should look at a conversion matrix for A1s down to D4s and look at the % of those MQLs become accepted (Lead Acceptance Rate by Lead Score report via CRM). You should also look at what happens when your target buyer, scores highly, and then becomes part of an opportunity - are there other patterns that are worth noting: opportunity close rates for A leads is x time faster than any other score? Having your own benchmark for what happens when you get an A1 lead will build confidence in your scoring model and drive the right behaviour.
Lead Acceptance rates rise. A good system will invoke sales' trust in marketing and the leads they generate. McAfee, the 2011 Markie Winner in our Clean House category sought after Eloqua's AppCloud tools for data.com and Demandbase when they saw a dual decline in Lead Scores and fewer leads going over to CRM over time. Missing data impacts, routing, lead scoring, segmentation, reporting and trust with your sales team. McAfee addressed the problem and saw an overall WW increase in lead acceptance and a 25% increase in acceptance in one of their global regions. On the behavior side, to ensure that you have the right patterns, you should look at any closed deals that were touched by marketing and look for the campaigns that influenced the buyers (first campaign, last campaign before opp creation) and chat with sales about any tactics that are offline that can be looped into your scoring model. Either way, if sales has trust in the data - both from a fit and engagement perspective, they will work the leads and any hesitation to accept should go away.
Average / Total Opportunity Value rises. Being able to model your buyer's actions into a science may give your sales team an opportunity to cross sell or deepen that initial conversation. 2011 Markie Winner for Integration Innovation, Progress Software experienced a drop in lead creation, but a rise in total opportunity creation and closed won revenue by leveraging Eloqua's AppCloud to pull in buyer attributes to support scoring. If you can instill confidence in your buyer early on, you are more likely to get their trust and be able to create a dialogue that leads to a superior buying experience and more revenue throughout that relationship.
Let me know your thoughts and your experiences with measuring the impact of your lead scoring system. I hope that you continue to look to Topliners for inspiration and to take your usage of marketing automation to the next level!
-Chang

Answer 1

Nice post Adrian.
I think another great indicator is your SAL to SQL rate increases as well. Ultimately, sales wants opportunities from Marketing not qualified leads. Another great indicator is time spent in the Qualifiy stage. Looking at a pipeline aging report, if your lead scored SALs are moving from SAL to SQL quicker than other channels, you know your sales team is having an easy time qualifiying these leads  - an indicator that your lead scoring program is doing a good job of finding the right person at the right time.