Lead Behaviors, Not Lead Scores

In a previous post, I decried regular lead scoring, favoring instead Audience Filters and clear Behavioral Triggers for a marketing qualified lead system.

I had a conversation the other day with a friend of mine who now needed to integrate another service line into the scoring system. She wanted to create a new field “Product 2 Score” and a whole separate list of workflows to handle these leads. While there are some legacy process reasons for separating these leads, this is the exact scenario that prompted my earlier article. If you find yourself creating special scoring scenarios, then the scoring concept is just broken.

Let’s say you have 5 products, but the audience for each one overlaps 95% of the time such that you can technically market any of these 5 products to the whole market and expect some success. Only the lead’s behaviors and self-identification will help you narrow the actual product interest before the hand-off to sales.

Why bother having 5 scoring fields with 20 scoring flows (100 campaigns!) when what you actually need is better behavioral tracking and response tracking for your marketing programs? In other words, stop sending Products 1, 2, and 3 when the Lead only responds to Products 4 and 5. If the Lead buys Product 5 now, they may still need Product 2 at a later point if they responded to the Product 2 program.

Even if each Product has its own audience by functional area, you still don’t need scoring to help you. Simply setup Smart Lists or filters to help automate audience segmentation by Product. Then watch what each group does over time that leads to a sale. Then build the workflows to send promising Leads (marketing qualified leads) to Sales at the optimal times. All of this is based on behavior patterns, not abstract scores and unnecessarily complex workflows.

Since my original post, I had conversations with people about what they do and came up with possible models for marketers.

Lead Lifecycle/Buying Stage Triggers: you’re probably planning or already using these to move people through your Revenue Cycle Modeler or existing lead flow. Why not take the scoring triggers out of this and use the content engagement for your early stages? Your late stage leads are already with sales, so you can worry less about them.

Content Offer Hybrid Model: The Hybrid, two-stage content offer suggested by David Meerman Scott: 1 piece is  a free download, the other webinar or more detailed paper requiring registration. In this model you get interest, sharing, and highly targeted engaged leads.

What is an Marketing Qualified Lead Worthy Trigger?

An MQL worthy trigger is one where the lead has taken the actions that indicate strong interest in your service(s). This is instead of a score threshold trigger. Such triggers could be

• More than 1 form fill out in 5 day period
• Responded to that juicy content offer by downloading and sharing it.
• Or more likely, a Call Now – request for contact on a form or via a demo request.

In Marketo, such behavior triggers may work even better with Programs than some Lead Scoring systems because Progression Statuses are based on behaviors. So you might end up with 3 or 4 “tracks” for a generic system:

• Call Now Request: a demo, an explicit request.
• Multiple Form Fill Outs in a Short Period: at least 2 fill outs where Call Now was not an option or selected.
• Multiple Views or Downloads of specific offers:
• High Value Offer Download.

I’m very curious who else has given up on traditional lead scoring. Let’s discuss below.

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