36. Building sales pipeline with HubSpot. How to do your lead scoring?

Introduction

What to do when you no longer have the time to research and call each of your leads? How do you know which contacts are most likely to bring you value and which are the ones that still need a little more time and nurture?

That’s where lead scoring comes into play. Lead scoring is the process that CRMs and marketing platforms such as HubSpot use to rank leads within your database. With scoring in place, you can quickly see which contacts match your ideal customer profile and which of those have shown a genuine interest in what you do. In today’s episode, I’m going to look at how lead scoring works and we learn how to create a scoring programme for your business.

To help you improve your marketing strategy, download the free brand script worksheet, which includes sections for each part of the storytelling framework we discuss in our episodes, here (or copy and paste the link below): 

demodia.com/brandscript-worksheet

---

Join marketing experts Simon Harvey and Daniel Kleber on Authentic Marketing, the biweekly podcast that provides proven marketing tips to improve your marketing efforts and help your business grow.

Subscribe to our biweekly episodes dropping Friday on your favourite podcast platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other.

Book a consultation with our Authentic Engagement coaches to help you navigate through the jungle of the business world: demodia.com/sales-marketing-review

Demodia Instagram: instagram.com/demodia_digital

Demodia LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/demodia

Episode Transcript

Life as a small business leader is never boring. In fact, most of the time you have way too much to do. So, how do you cope as your business starts to take off and leads start pouring into your pipeline? When you no longer have time to research and call every single one, how do you know which contacts are the most likely to bring you value? And which are the ones that still need a little more time and nurture? That's where lead scoring comes into play. And in today's episode, I'm going to look at how lead scoring works. And along with Daniel, we take a look at how to create a scoring program for your business. So let's get the show started. Hi there, I'm your host, Simon Harvey, and welcome to the Authentic Marketing Podcast in association with Demodia, where we give you actionable advice that will help you create marketing that works. So yeah, this week's been somewhat crazy for me. Um, we've got a large startup summit that's going on at the moment, and I'm going to be presenting there towards the end of the week. So I'm quite looking forward to that. Personally, I love events like this. They're a really great opportunity to get together with other folk and talk more with people like yourselves. So, you know, people that have taken that leap of faith and started their own businesses. I'm sure that some of those conversations They're going to lead them to potential new business over time, but, you know, I also know that with these sorts of events, the great thing about these startup conferences is there's many, many conversations that I'm going to have with people that are just going to be helping people, you know, talking with new company leaders and potentially students as well at these events, helping them to understand how to communicate more clearly and obviously to run the business better. I'm sure when you've got these big events, you pick up lots of leads, you talk to lots of people, but the trouble is always when you get back home, you've got to try and remember which of the companies or which of the people are the ones that you need to follow up with and which of those are the most important ones to follow up with. The other catch comes when you've got a booth or when you're presenting a breakout session or something like that and then at the end of a couple of days talking to lots and lots of people you suddenly get an extra spreadsheet presented to you with a great big list of attendees. You upload that into your CRM or you put it into your other management tools and then you've got no idea who you've spoken to, uh, who just happened to visit your booth or watched your session and you know who is actually worthwhile spending your time with. And, um, you know, like everything, when you get back to the office, you've got way too much to do. You know, there's only so many hours in the day. So where do you start? That's the big challenge. Limited time, lots of contacts. You need a way to be able to filter the list and you need a way to be able to quickly establish. Who are the right people? Who should you be talking to now? And the ones that still need a little bit more time to help them understand exactly how you help them solve their problem. There is of course, like everything in marketing, a solution to this. And it comes this time in this form of lead scoring. So we mentioned this a couple of times in previous episodes. And in today's episode, we're going to take a lot deeper look at it. So lead scoring for those that haven't come across it before is the process that CRMs and marketing platforms such as HubSpot used to rank leads within your contact database with scoring in place, the idea is that you can very quickly see which contacts match your ideal customer profile and which of those. Have actually shown a genuine interest in what you do. I think probably with that, it's time that we bring Daniel in and uh, yeah, let's have a little bit more of a chat about lead scoring, what it is and how to implement that within your own business. So hi there, Daniel. Welcome back. Good to have you here again. How's things? What's your week been?

Hi Simon. My week was good. At the moment I'm reading a book about bass jumping. Oh, bass jumping.

Why is that? What's going on there then?

Well, I subscribed for a course in April and it was quite a spontaneous decision. Yeah. And right now I'm trying to learn as much as I can about the sport and get all my equipment and make sure that it's also working.

Oh, okay. I will, I'll leave you to that. I don't think you're going to get me jumping off the edge of a cliff in the short term. So yeah, maybe in a year or two. So yeah, this week we've been talking about lead scoring and in particular, you know, how do you qualify leads as they're coming in through your pipeline? So is that something you're using within your system?

To be honest, no, I never really done lead scoring and I mean, I've read about it and heard about it, but I never really went too deep into the material. Yeah, okay. But it interests me. I want to know how I can benefit from that.

So I guess to go back to the beginning. The purpose of lead scoring is really to be able to pick out the needle from the haystack. So, as you start to go through and generate more leads through your advertising campaigns, or if you collect lists of contacts through trade shows and events, you're going to put all of those into your database. And the thing is that as a salesperson, you can't follow up with every single one of those, you know, if you're a small company like you, you only got one or maybe two people that are dealing with sales and they don't spend the whole day doing that. So you want to be able to reach out to the people that are most likely to be interested in the stuff that you do. And so what lead scoring does is it helps you to mark potentially which are the hot leads and which are the cold leads in there. And what we do is we attach a score to those leads and to the individuals. The way that we do that is we look at typically three things. The first thing is we look at the individual themselves, so who's the contact that you've got in your database. And the first thing we're going to do is to look at the profile of that person. So the demographics, you could call it in there. So if you're selling to a certain type of person, you know, it might be what gender are they? What age group are they? For businesses, You might be more interested in whether or not this person is an executive versus just being a junior person within the business. You might also be interested in the role that they have in there. Are they working for the finance department or are they working for the HR department or for engineering? So you can look at those sort of demographic tools and traits of the individual. And that's the first thing you want to look at. So, the second thing that you want to look at with the lead scoring is then the sort of the company information or the firmographic information as it's often called. In that, instead of looking at the contact, we look at the company that the contact is linked to and then we can score that. So we can say, yeah, this company was within a certain industry or this company has a certain revenue. This company has a certain number of employees. So from that, you build up this profile. The third thing then that you want to know. Is you don't really just want to reach out to everybody, even if they're in the perfect company, you only really want to be talking to people that have shown some of interest in you. So if you've just met them in an event and they happen to see that you've got a mug on your trade show stand, so they walked up and said, Oh, can I have a mug? And you had a conversation with him about that. You know, the likelihood is they're probably not really interested, but you've captured their information in there. The other thing that you want to look at as part of the lead score is how interested are they or what we'd say the behavior of this person. In that sense, we want to look at have they looked at or downloaded several resources from our website? Have they viewed several emails and clicked on links inside several emails? Have they clicked a book a meeting link somewhere or looked at your pricing page on your website, you know, something that's more indicative that they're ready to purchase rather than just the fact that you happen to have got a name that it's in the right industry in there.

Okay, but what I still don't understand, let's say I want to put a score on two different leads. Mm hmm. One lead is coming from a tech industry and the other one is coming from the car industry.

Yeah,

now if I'm more interested in the tech industry one, I will put the highest score on that one, right? Correct. Yeah, but How do I calculate the score in the end?

Yeah, good question. So there's no fixed way of calculating that score, but there are some sort of best practices. Very often what you see these systems doing is they give a numeric score to basically the behavior profile. That score might go from one to a hundred. For example, if they view a couple of different web pages inside your website, you might give them 20 points. If they fill in a white paper download or visit a webinar, you might give them 30 points. If they fill in a contact us form, you might give them a hundred points already in that. If your threshold is a hundred, if they fill in your contact us form and you know what that does then is you give These individual activities, a score that's associated with each of them. And then you add that up. And then when they get to that threshold, when they get to that a hundred points, then you know that they've shown enough interest in our company that's worthwhile reaching out to them.

Okay. So you got to have a maximum. Amount of points that you can give each lead and when one of the leads reaches this maximum point then, you know, okay That's a lead that I want to focus on.

Yeah, I would call it a threshold rather than a maximum You know, they can go over this threshold Maybe when they get to 80 of your maximum score, you can say yes, this is of interest and again That's something that as a business when you start to talk to these leads you can tune that threshold up and down and say okay That's a lead I'm finding that I'm having conversations with people that only got 70 points and they're actually still interested, or it might be that you go the other way and you say, okay, I need 90 points because people really aren't showing much of an interest until they've done quite a lot of activities with us. Okay,

so you first need to set up the scoring system and then you need to work with it for a while to really get a feeling of. How many points a lead has to have in order to really become interesting.

Yeah, exactly that. You work with it over time and lead scoring is definitely not something that you set up once and you forget. It's something that's a living entity that you're going to tune and the same goes with the organization part. So, you know, we talked just then about the behavior score. But then I mentioned a minute ago, you have this second score, which normally what we do is we combine together the personal score, the demographic score, and the company score, the firmographic score. And often you see that referred to as a profile score, so the profile of the individual that you're selling to. And quite a common way of doing that is instead of using a number, you use a letter for the profile score. So maybe you have A to E or something along those lines, A being a really good match on your profile and E being You know, somebody that really you don't want to sell to at all, because there's a complete mismatch in the company or the person's type. And that way, then you've got two parts. It's easy to see, you know, the numeric score is the behavior and the alphabetic score in there is the profile of that person. And again, with the profile score, you can do the same thing. So you can say if this company has more than 50 employees or between 50 and 500 employees, mark them up one grade. So they'd go from an E to a D. Or you can do it the other way as well. You can have negative scores. So you could say, I don't sell to governments or I don't sell to charities, for example. So if somebody registers that belongs to a not for profit or that works for a government organization, you could have a negative score as well. So you could say, go from a C down to a D at that point in time. And then you could look at the profile of the person too, and you could say, okay, this person works in the engineering department, so go from a, you know, a B to an A. Or you're going the other way, you could say this person is a journalist or a student, so go from a D to an E, so you move them down one grade or up one grade. So you can do those sorts of things with the company and the firm profiles as well.

Okay, so, I guess you will have the most work in the beginning of this process because you have to set up the whole scoring system for yourself. Yeah. You have to decide on your own how many scores you want to give for which action or which industry and so on. Mm hmm. Yeah. So do you have any tips for someone who hasn't started yet to set up a scoring system like that?

Yeah, so I've got a template which I'll make available online so people can come into there. We've just got a spreadsheet that we typically use and it gives you some good examples in there and it gives you a way of setting up that scoring process. So I'll put a link to that into the show notes, definitely. But just to give you an idea of a few things that are in there, you know, what should you score and what shouldn't you score? For example, if you think about the person, let's start with the demographic part of the profile. Looking at things like the gender of the person, you can score on that if that's something that you're doing as a B2C profile, or the age of that person. You could look at, maybe if you're more interested in the business relationship in there, you could look at the functional role of that person. So, are they an executive versus an executive? A junior staff member, for example, there, or do they work for a certain department within the company? They're all good things to score on. And the reason that they're good things to score on is because within your forms and within your CRM, you can create pop up lists. You have specific values that you can put into there and your value is always the same. And that's important with scoring. You need to know a value equals something in order to increment or decrement the score. To give you an example of a bad thing to score against, a job title is often something that people tell me, I only want to be able to sell to people with this particular job title, you know, CMO or head of marketing or whatever. But the trouble with that is As things stands at the moment, I'm sure it's going to change with AI as we move forwards, but people express their job title in so many different ways. You know, you might see somebody write down CMO or Head of Marketing or Marketing Director or Marketing Executive or Director of Marketing. You know, there's all so many different ways that you can write down the same job title in there. And the thing with scoring is you're looking to do a text match. You're looking to see if something exactly equals this and then you give them some score and because you don't know how they've described or written down their job title, you can't score on that, so it's very, very difficult to create scores based on things like a job title. As I say, until AI comes in and takes over a bit more there, I would advise against trying to use things like job titles at the moment and focus more on functional roles.

You're saying that this is an automated process.

Yeah, that's exactly the idea is that we automate these. Basically within HubSpot, what you can do is you can set up a scoring criteria. They call it the HubSpot score basically in there and you can create custom scoring properties as well that are attached to companies and attached to individuals. And you have rules that you set up in there. So you can say, if, for example, if company has between 50 and 500 people, then add 10 points. It's literally exactly like that. And it's completely automated then that when somebody updates their own data inside your CRM, so either you manually update it or they update it by filling in a form, then the change in that score is completely automated. And you just see the score happening, you know, you go and look at the contact and you see this is the latest version of the score. So that's a living value basically that will change over the life of the contact.

Okay, so that's good to know. You can program your lead scoring and then automate it using Hotspot.

Exactly that. Yeah. The other thing that you probably want to automate in there, you want to be able to identify the point that a lead is ready for a sales conversation. And if you go back to our conversation about what does a pipeline look like that we were talking about last week. We said that you've got leads and subscribers, marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, all of those sorts of things. Most of your leads are going to start off in either that subscriber or the lead stage. And actually you don't want your sales people to be reaching out to all of those people. What you want to be able to do in there is you want to flag the point that they should get in touch with them. And that's the point that they would move typically into a marketing qualified lead. This scoring is typically part off that marketing qualification process that says that this is the right sort of person. They work for the right company. They're in the right sort of role. They've expressed enough interest. So again, what you can do in HubSpot. is if you've got any of the professional hubs where you've got workflows available to you, you can create a very simple workflow that literally looks at that HubSpot score property and when that reaches your threshold value then the workflow basically changes the life cycle stage field for the particular contact from lead or subscriber and moves them up to marketing qualified lead. And then you just tell your sales people as part of their process that anybody that's a marketing qualified lead, they're the ones that they should be looking at, and they're the ones that they should be sending emails to or making a follow up phone call with to see if there is a genuine interest there. I

think it's pretty interesting that you can automatically change the lifecycle status of a lead by reaching a certain score.

Yeah, and that's it. The whole point is it makes that simple. It finds the needle in the haystack for you. That's nice.

I think, uh, I managed to learn a lot in this episode again. Thank you very much for this valuable information, Simon.

Cool. And, uh, yeah, look forward to catching up again next week.

Thank you, Simon. It was my pleasure.

Okay. Take care. So thanks for your questions, Daniel. Yeah, there's many great questions in the conversation today, but I think the most important thing that I took away today was that there's two criteria that you want to be looking at when you're setting up a scoring system. So those are the profile of the contact or their demographic information and their behavior or activity information in there. I think with these two things You can most effectively build up a really clear picture of which leads are a good fit for your business and of those, which are the ones that are ready to buy. So if you're having problems setting up and optimizing your lead scoring or contact database, then you can hire an authentic engagement coach. Just go to wantauthentic. com to hire a coach that will show you how to increase the effectiveness of your marketing and give you an easier way to grow your business. So we're at the point in the show again, where I like to give you a set of concrete steps that you can take to improve your marketing. And grow your business. Today, of course, you're going to be trying out lead scoring, and you're going to set up a lead scoring plan for your business to help you out. I've created a simple spreadsheets that you can use to build and test your scoring rules. I've put a link to this into the podcast notes for those that want to jump into there and download that. In the sheet, you'll find that I've added some of the most common criteria that businesses typically tend to use when they're scoring their leads or customers. And then of course, there's plenty of space in there where you can add in your own criteria to that too. You'll also find that I've included in there a section where you can add your demographic or firmographic profile scoring criteria. And there's also a section in there for you to add in that activity based criteria. So jump in there, take a look through and come up with some basic criteria. Then, when you've done that, I want you to go through and assign a score to each of those individual activities or criteria. When you're assigning a score, there is no hard and fast rule. You just rank things based on what you feel is most important. So, for example, you might give five points for an activity of minor significance, you know, something like viewing a web page. You might give 10 points for a medium activity. So maybe that's viewing three web pages in the same area within 24 hours, or you might give say 50 points for something that's much more important, you know, something that should bounce you straight into the top position in your scoring ranks, for example, filling in a contact form. Also don't forget in there that you can have negative scores. When someone comes, say, for example, a country that you don't serve, or they visit, for example, your careers page on your website, you can give them a negative score to cancel out in the case of the webpage. You give maybe minus five to cancel out the five points that they would have got for visiting your page in any case. So add all your criteria in there, and then at the end of that, when you're happy you've got everything done, go through, and then for both the activity and profile scores, I want you to take a note of the theoretical maximum score that any contact can achieve if they check all of the boxes. So this is going to be important later on because basically this is going to help you to identify which are the best leads in your database and which are the ones that need nurturing. So for example your maximum score for activity is 100 points. Anybody with a score of maybe over 80 are the ones that you want to start looking at and paying more interest in. If you're using HubSpot, this is now the time where you can jump into there and actually physically set that up in the system. The way I go about doing this is creating two scoring properties. HubSpot has its own HubSpot score property in there. That's the default scoring property in all the accounts. And I typically tend to use that to add in the activity related information that I've added into my spreadsheet. Then I typically create a second scoring property and I call that my profile score and I add into there obviously the demographic and firmographic information. Just as a quick pointer again with HubSpot if you're creating long lists of things like we only serve people in these 10 countries what you can do is you can use lists and dynamic lists to match the people that are in those countries and then you add the list into your scoring criteria. So that's just a little tip that I've picked up over the years of working with this. So that's all there is to it really. Once you've added a criteria in, one line for each of the criteria in your spreadsheet, within a few minutes you should start to see scores being assigned to the contacts in your database. And then you can go through and look and start to determine which are the ones you should be calling. Of course, as always, if you need help, feel free to just reach out to me. Simon at the modia. com is my email address. Send me a man. If you've got any questions, if you're getting stuck, or if you just need help, I'm always here and always available to help. So that's all for today's episode of the authentic marketing podcast. Thanks as always for listening. And if this is your first time joining us. Don't forget to bookmark the podcast. Being a small business advocate yourself, you'll know that the most valuable thing that you can do is to share this episode with someone else that you know, who runs their own business. If you found this helpful, then they're going to too. Thanks once again for listening, take care and I'll see you next time.