Goal: To deliver marketing leads that are qualified and ready for sales to engage and close.

Executive Summary

The Challenge

Many of our customers come to Act-On looking for the ability to track and benchmark the quality of their leads. Being able to define leads that are ready to hand to sales vs. those that need further engagement is probably one of the biggest opportunities in marketing automation today. 

The examples referenced in this playbook are in the B2B space with very traditional lead stages: top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. One common mistake is to have sales call every single lead because of an inability to prioritize which lead has the best chance of actually closing. What if you could target leads based on where they came from - eg., a trade show lead vs. the much-preferred referral from a customer? 

Today, the most efficient approach to managing, engaging, and pinpointing your highly coveted qualified leads is called lead scoring. And lead scoring is the gateway to creating highly efficient Automated Programs. It gives an objective system to automatically rank and prioritize leads. The ability to score the behavior and status of all leads enables marketing teams to overcome key challenges such as:

• Defining when a lead is ready to be handed to sales
• Identifying leads that need further engagement and are not yet ready for a sales conversation
• Benchmarking lead quality and improving over time
• Increasing lead quality to shorten sale cycles and close business faster

Lead scoring can also help fill the gap that often exists between marketing and sales. For example, a customer in the automotive space selling third-party warranty packages has defined when a lead was considered “sales-ready” without engaging with their partners in sales. They also needed far more useful information on a lead that sales could use such as interests, pain points, and budget. When introduced to the value of lead scoring, this customer was ready to switch gears and move forward. 

The Solution

A lead scoring system assigns points to contacts based on the lead’s profile (what we call explicit conditions) and based on behaviors (implicit conditions) the lead has taken. Each lead accumulates points as they take actions (visit the website, open emails, attend events, etc.), and as additional details are filled in on their contact record (job title, company size, location, etc.).

Building a lead scoring program is pretty simple when it comes right down to it. To get started, it is important to break out both the profile and behavior/activity attributes. We have outlined a few examples below, as well as the associated screenshots of how both of these appear within the Act-On platform. 

The Buyer’s Profile

This set of criteria is used to identify the types of people and companies with the highest propensity to buy. Here, you want to examine if the user is qualified and likely to buy your product using demographic and firmographic data. Note that you can create negative scores too to keep unwanted contacts or activity out of the mix.  

Examples: 

• Job Title 
• Company Size 
• Location

The Buyer’s Behavior (Implicit)

This set of criteria is used to identify buyers that are highly engaged with your brand. Behavior-based criteria is a gauge of readiness to buy and can help you pinpoint where the contact is in the buying cycle. 

There are two other important parts that need to be addressed. 

1. Picking the time period. There is a pull-down menu that sets the right time frame to be tracking your data. This maps to the buying cycle from the start to when a lead identifies themselves (awareness) to a marketing-qualified lead (MQL).
2. The other area is while we have pre-conditioned activities to rank, you can have customized ones as well.  

   

Examples: 

• Visits to your web pages 
• Attendance at events 
• Media downloads and form submissions 

How to set up your lead scoring program depends on which characteristics and actions you find most important at each stage of the funnel. Act-On, recommends using a target MQL score of 40, but as discussed this is an important step to take with sales, to better understand the steps and time a buyer takes to purchase something from your organization. 

The graphic to the right shows the connection between the buyer’s experience and a traditional funnel with the associated scoring applied to each stage. Once this is set, it is important to come back to it and evaluate the approach. You will want to review if the defined stages are still appropriate and what the close rates are so you can better determine the level of lead quality. 

You can also have multiple lead score sheets with different scoring stages. Multiple score sheets will allow you to create up to 4 additional sheets in addition to your default score sheet that can be used to expand your current scoring model. This lets you customize your lead scoring rules for different teams, regions/geography, products/divisions, customers vs prospects, or any other segmentation of your marketing efforts.

A Few Final Steps! 

In order to efficiently bring together your lead score sheet with automated programs that engage leads (and customers) from inaction to action, you need to tie it back with the Primary List in marketing contacts, as well as syncing with your CRM. By and large, this gets overlooked, and really is your ticket by eliminating too many one-off automated programs to support the funnel engagement. Be sure to complete two important steps:

1. Create an engagement segment within your Primary List e.g. Top/Middle/Bottom. By and large, this gets overlooked the majority of the time and provides a more efficient way of managing any type of automated program that moves a lead through the various different stages of engagement. Here is a screenshot of what the engagement segment looks like within Act-On.
   
   
2. Sync the lead score field to your CRM so that your sales team can see the lead score of each contact. This allows sales team members to sort, prioritize, and engage with leads efficiently. 

We detail these actions below in the Step-by-Step Section, which is supported by video.

The Impact

With lead scoring properly set up and managed over time, customers can now gain key strategic benefits:

• Better analyze both online and offline buying cycles;
• Increases marketing’s ability to pass qualified leads to sales; 
• Helps sales focus efforts on the most likely buyers 

The marketing team now has measurable data on the insights of each person and the efficiencies that let them focus on other strategic initiatives and leverage their time and resources more impactfully. 

How to Build to This

As we discussed in the overview, there are two attributes when setting your scoring rules: Profile-based and Activity-based. Below are the steps to set up the scoring rules for each of these attributes. 

You can find the Lead Scoring in Act-on here:

1. Click Contacts;
2. Select Scoring Rules;
3. Add values for each Profile, Activity, and Time Period;
4. Click the Save button.
   
   

Profile Details  

1. Under the Profile section, click Add Profile Condition to set up a condition.
2. Add a descriptive name for your condition, such as "High-Level Executives." This description is what will display for your reference on the Scoring Rules page.
3. In the next field, type or select the field name of interest, such as Industry or Job Title. This should match the name of an actual field in your lists.
4. Choose a condition such as Equals or Contains. Enter the values you want to assign a specific score to, such as "President" or "CEO".

• If there is more than one value that qualifies, enter them all in the box and separate them by semicolons, e.g. "President; CEO; VP"

Activities (Behavior) Details

1. Under the Activity section, select the time period of interest (or select ALL for lifetime lead scoring)
2. Assign a unique numeric value to each specific activity.

• Items in the default list (Was sent a message, Opened a message, Clicked on a message, Viewed a form, and so on) apply to "generic" characteristics: they don't apply to a specific message, form, document, page, or webinar.
• If you prefer, you can assign a numeric value to activities for specific items, instead (or as well), as described in the following steps.

Remember to give the highest point values to the items you listed as the most important buying behaviors.

If you assign a different power of 2 (1, 2, 4, 8, etc.) to each rule, the sum of scores for any given address will tell you exactly what that address has done. There's only one combination of behaviors that results in a score of 3, 6, or 10, for example. You can then create segments for each combination to target each group!

Add a Score Sheet 

The process to set up and use Multiple Score Sheets is the same as above, with the exception of adding additional sheets.

To create additional Score Sheets:

1. Contacts > Scoring Rules.
2. Click the blue + icon.
3. Add a Sheet Name and Save.
4. Follow the scoring set-up guide above to populate your sheets. 
   
   

Create Lead Scores for Your Marketing Lists 

Creating an Overall Lead Score list allows you to segment and define a grouping of leads or contacts based on their individual lead score which allows for greater visibility to your most viable prospects and further allows for a more results-driven targeted campaign. This list will pull the leads and contacts from all of the Marketing lists you’ve imported and/or uploaded into one overall Lead Score list.

Lead Score to Marketing List Details

1. Click Contacts, and then click Marketing Lists.
2. Click New.
3. Enter the name of your new list (e.g., ‘Overall Lead Score’) in the Enter New List Name field.
4. Select the folder where you would like the list to be stored.
5. Under the Set Up New List Contents drop-down, select Locate contacts with specific response behaviors.
6. Under the Behavior section, select the drop-down that says All Specified Behaviors and change it to Overall Behavior Score.
7. In the drop-down that populates, select At Least This Many and set the numeric value to 1.
   
   

Inject Score into List using List Maintenance Program

List Maintenance Programs allow you to make automated changes to your lists. They're useful for injecting a lead score into a list field so that you can use them for segmentation, sending, pushing scores to CRM, etc. Below are the instructions on how to set up a list maintenance program to inject the score into a field in your marketing list.  (Note: if you are looking to push the score to your CRM follow the instruction labeled Push the Lead Score from your Act-on Lists).

List Maintenance Details 

1. In Act-on navigate to Automation > List Maintenance Programs.
2. Select the Blue circle in the right-hand corner. This will open a pop-up window with a composer to create a new list maintenance program.
3. Give your program a name and description (e.g., 'Update Lead Scores') and click to Add Step.
4. For Program Contacts, click "select" and choose the marketing list you would like to have the Lead Score injected into.
5. Select the Add Step Button
6. Choose Change Field Value.
7. Click the drop-down labeled "and update field" and choose the field in your list you would like used for the Lead Score.
8. Click the drop-down that is labeled "as follows" and change it from "Set Value To" to "Set Value to Behavioral Score".
9. Click Done and then Save. This will open the dashboard for the list maintenance program.
10. Click the button that says Schedule and set the maintenance program to how often you would like it to run.
11. Once schedule you can select Run Now and the program will do a one-time sync and update your list.
    
    

Push the Lead Score from your Act-On List(s) to CRM 

By injecting the Lead Score into a field in our lists, we can push it back to our CRM. This works with CRMs that connect directly with Act-on. These CRMs include Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, SugarCRM, and Infor. Below are the steps on how to set up the list sync. 

1. Create a text field in your CRM that will contain the Lead Score.
1. In your CRM, create a new field for Contacts and Leads. We recommend naming the field Act-on Behavior Score.
2. Add the field to your existing CRM list in Act-on
1. Navigate to your CRM list(s) in Act-on under Contact > Marketing Lists.
2. Select the drop-down next to the number of records in the CRM list > Import/Export > <Name of CRM> Sync Setup. 
3. Select Add List Columns and choose the CRM field to contain the behavior score. Click Save.
3. Set the CRM Sync settings to push the field to the CRM. Make sure you are only pushing the field and not pulling. This is because we are creating the behavior score in Act-on and by pulling it from your CRM we will get incorrect data.
1. Navigate to your CRM list(s) in Act-on under Contact > Marketing Lists.
2. Select the drop-down next to the number of records in your CRM list > Import/Export > <Name of CRM> Sync Setup. 
3. Select the Push to <Name of CRM> and Select Update. 
4. Choose Select Push-Update Fields and select the field that will contain the Act-on lead score then Save. Set up a List Maintenance Program to inject the Lead Score into the CRM list
   1. In Act-on navigate to Automation > List Maintenance Programs.
   2. Select the Blue circle in the right-hand corner. This will open a pop-up window with a composer to create a new list maintenance program.
   3. Give your program a name and description (e.g., 'Update Lead Scores') and click to Add Step.
   4. For Program Contacts, click "select" and choose the marketing list you would like to have the Lead Score injected into.
   5. Select the Add Step Button
   6. Choose Change Field Value.
   7. Click the drop-down labeled "and update field" and choose the field in your list you would like used for the Lead Score.
   8. Click the drop-down that is labeled "as follows" and change it from "Set Value To" to "Set Value to Behavioral Score".
   9. Click Done and then Save. This will open the dashboard for the list maintenance program.
   10. Click the button that says Schedule and set the maintenance program to how often you would like it to run.
   11. Once schedule you can select Run Now and the program will do a one-time sync and update your list.