Check out the worksheet below for some help on lead scoring!

Lead Score Overlay Capabilities

The Net-Results lead scoring system is the most flexible, capable lead scoring system in existence.
Using lead scoring, you can allow a prospect to tell you when they’re ready to buy without you even having to ask. As visitors interact with your website, filling out your forms and providing their contact information, you could be attributing value to those actions and details. Those scores add up and, over time, indicate that this lead is ready to buy (or qualified).

The goal of Lead Score Overlays is not only to use lead scoring, but apply its concepts to all of your available products and services. You may create as many Lead Score Overlays as you like, each operating simultaneously. For example, Overlay A evaluates a prospect’s interest/qualifications in Product A while Overlay B separately scores their interest in Product B.

Read more on using Lead Scoring to know when Contacts are sales ready.

A lead score in Net-Results consists of three component parts or categories. The combined total score from each of these components makes up your prospect’s overall lead score.

Contact Score: A lead can’t be qualified if you don’t know their name. The Contact component of a Lead Score Overlay allows you to score each prospect based on static attributes like job title, industry, and the fact that their name is not blank in your database. The Contact score is the first component of a prospect’s overall lead score.

Activity Score: Prospect activity such as specific pages viewed, PDFs read, videos watched, whitepapers downloaded, etc. can be great indicators of a prospect’s specific interest. The Activity component of a Lead Score Overlay lets you score each prospect’s activity as they interact with your website(s) and your email marketing messages. The Activity score is the second component of a prospect’s overall lead score.

Engagement Score: When a prospect engages with your brand online it’s a great indicator that they’ve moved to the next level. The Engagement component of a Lead Score Overlay may be used to monitor web form responses, blog comments, webinar registrations/participation, etc. The Engagement score is the third component of a prospect’s overall lead score.

Your Lead Score Overlay rules use the exact same method of segment-driven conditions available across Net-Results. Any contact details, visit activity, campaign interaction, form submissions, or combinations of these things can be attributed a point value to be added or subtracted. You set the rules, assign their value, and choose at what thresholds a lead can be considered qualified. Then, using a Segment combined with an Alert or Report (or both), you can be notified to contact that lead.

You have control over the rule’s frequency. Setting the rule’s frequency or “Run:” to “Automatically” will be constantly monitoring contacts that meets the rule’s conditions (much like a perpetual campaign). Setting the rule’s frequency to “Every” will limit the rule to only look for contacts that meet the conditions at the interval you set.

Lead Scoring Best Practices

Lead Scoring methods vary greatly from customer to customer, which is why we built our Lead Score Overlays to be as flexible as possible, however the values you give to each desirable attribute and behavior are largely arbitrary. They need to represent how important each item is as well as be weighed against the other attributes and behaviors you’re scoring on to decide what a reasonable value is for each.

The first thing to decide will be the criteria you’re scoring on, and it helps to do this by rule category (Contact, Activity, Engagement).

Remember that Contact Score rules only grant points once, so you’ll use these for static attributes like job title, geographic location, whether or not they have an email address/phone number, possibly List Membership, etc. Identify some desirable attributes that you’re looking for in a qualified lead.
Next, move on to general activity:

• Will you be scoring on email opens, clicks, visits to the website based on a campaign email?
• Will the point values always be the same, or will it vary by campaign?
Are there certain pages of the website that are more important than others?
• Will you be granting more points for a longer visit, more page views, how they got to the website?
• Finally, think about what you’d consider to be “engagement.” Will it be hitting your landing pages, submitting your forms?
• Other areas of the website that talk about your value proposition?
• Downloading certain assets?

Two additional things that also help with the above process:

Getting your Sales team & Marketing team together to discuss what attributes and behaviors make up a “qualified lead”

Looking at the tracked history of your recently closed deals to see what attributes and behaviors they exhibited (the latter of which usually requires a month or two on Net-Results to build that history).

Once you have an idea of what you’ll be scoring on and how important each item is, then you can start thinking about the Lead Qualification Threshold. Is 100 points achievable based on how many rules you have and how many points they’re granting? Is it too high or too low? Do you want to mark any rules as required so that a contact will have to meet them to be considered qualified, like having an email address and/or phone number?

Keep in mind too that Lead Scoring is not set in stone; you can and will be making adjustments as you go along, which is why we always suggest running a “test” overlay in parallel with your “live” overlay. While changing rule point values does not retroactively re-score your contacts, you may find it necessary if you’ve accidentally given contacts an “exploit” so they’re accruing a ton of lead score without putting in much effort.

Check out this video to learn more