HubSpot Lead Scoring Simplified

“Everyone is not your customer.” – Seth Godin

Some people go to the mall to shop, the others go just to window shop. Brands want to keep both of these kinds. “Why”, you ask? The one that buys from you is a sure-fire customer, but the one that peruses is a prospect who may buy one of these days or someday. Since you can’t do business on assumptions, your saving grace, in this case, is lead scoring. If HubSpot is your preferred marketing automation platform, you must make the most of one of its most significant features which is lead scoring. Read on to quickly get a hang of the ‘what and how’ of HubSpot lead scoring.

What is HubSpot lead scoring?

It’s a part of HubSpot’s lead management system that enables you to assign value or a certain number of points to a lead on the basis of the information that you’ve received from them and how they’ve engaged with your brand across different channels. It helps the marketing and sales teams efficiently prioritize leads, eliminate the bad leads, reduce manual effort, and ultimately increase ROI.

What type of data can you use for lead scoring?

There are 5 types of data that you can use to score leads in HubSpot:

1. Company Details: To assign points to your target audience, you can ask questions on your landing page forms like if they’re a B2B or a B2C organization, or if they’re more interested in prospecting to companies of a particular industry, type or size. You could give a negative score to leads that don’t fit in the criteria that you’re looking for.

2. Demographics: Your landing page forms must contain demographic questions, again to determine your target audience. Upon receiving the answers, you could take away points from the leads of a certain demographic that the sales team does not sell to. Additionally, you could assign extra credit to leads that fill in the optional information fields on your landing pages.

3. Behavioral Pattern: The interaction that a lead has with your website helps you plenty in determining the level of their buying interest. Analyze your conversions as to how a prospect turned into a customer. Which pages did they visit on your website, how many times they landed on that page, and what all did they download? By this, you can give more weight to high-value pages/forms. In the same manner, you could give a higher score to leads based on the frequency of their visits on your web page, that is, the greater the frequency, the higher the lead score.

4. Email Pattern: You can’t assume the level of the lead’s buying interest based on a simple opt-in request. To get a clearer picture, you’d need to dig into the lead’s email engagement pattern with you via open and click-through rates. You’d want to give a higher lead score to leads that click-through on high-value email content, like case studies or demo requests.

5. Social Pattern: On the basis of the lead’s engagement with your brand on social media platforms, you can get a fair idea of the degree of their buying interest. Consider the number of times they click-through or share your posts, tweets, etc. The higher this number, the higher the lead score.

What are the categories of qualified leads?

The primary reason for lead scoring is to determine their conversion potential, so as to devote them as much time and effort as they deserve. These are divided into two categories:

MQL: A Marketing Qualified Lead is one that is more likely to become a customer as opposed to other leads on the basis of factors like demographics, behavioral pattern, etc.

SQL: A Sales Qualified Lead is one that has, somehow, given an indication that they intend to buy from you. They’ve likely done their research, contemplation, and comparison of your product/service with your competitors, and their buying interest is higher compared to the other leads.

How to get HubSpot lead scoring savvy?

There are 3 easy steps to ace lead scoring in HubSpot:

1. Define your criteria into the HubSpot Lead Scoring Tool: The data that you have to assign weight to each lead, input that scoring criteria into the HubSpot Lead Scoring Tool. It would also serve the purpose of you having a record of the customer journey. Here’s a screenshot from the tool:

2. Create your smart lists: Create a smart list for your MQLs. The criteria must specify that the lead has a HubSpot score greater than or equal to the lower number in your MQL range and less than or equal to the number below your SQL range. Then create another list for your SQLs. These would include leads with HubSpot score greater than or equal to the range that you’ve defined for your SQLs.

3. Build an SQL feedback loop for your sales team: Create a custom contact property for sales to fill after the first or second touch-point with an SQL that’s been handed off to them from the marketing team. You could further add three options to this contact property, ‘Unqualified’, ‘Marketing Qualified’, and ‘Sales Qualified’. The benefit of this feedback loop is that if the sales team advises that the lead is not ‘Sales Qualified’ and marketing needs to nurture it more, that lead would lose points and would be sent back to the MQL workflow. In case the sales team advises that a lead is ‘Unqualified’, it would lose plenty of points and may even be deleted from the database altogether as it could be a competitor, a third-party vendor, or just a merry chase.

To be whip-smart at HubSpot lead scoring, effectively communicate with your sales team since they’re at the forefront, talk to your recurring customers to determine what content or touch-points were of the greatest impact that led them to buy from you, and depend on your analytics reports to get an in-depth understanding of what works best for you. With these steps, you could make the most of the HubSpot Lead Scoring tool for the overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts, consistency of sales momentum, and a ‘never-seen-before’ ROI. Now, go ahead and score those leads, they’re waiting!

Are you making the most of HubSpot Lead Scoring?