Having worked with a scoring system for a couple of months, I’ve been watching closely to see what I can learn about how to set it up properly. I was fortunate enough to catch a great session at the MarketingProfs B2B event earlier this summer, and I have a co-worker that has hooked me up with a few recent articles. Some of the more interesting points:
- Depreciation is Key: knowing how long your buying cycle should be will allow you to automatically downgrade leads, I’ve heard that best practice is that anything that is in 2x longer than the average should probably be discounted to 50% and gone by 4x
- Identify the Tipping Points: In short order you should be able to identify buying signs, often in terms of website traffic patterns and resources requested. This is where the points pile up to prioritize leads.
- Understand the Customer’s Buying Cycle: Knowing how long the cycle is between purchases will define the size database you will need to generate enough pipeline. Although a longer cycle tends to be more painful, it does allow you to build up momentum.
- Generate Awareness for when the Prospect is Ready: This closes the loop. Ultimately your database is full and you’ll have to go back to generating awareness to make sure that the names you’ve worked so hard to gather continue to keep you at the front of their mind – and these actions may not generate points at all as they are not buying signs of any fashion.
Now to get on to email campaign A/B testing…