Lead scoring: friend or folly?

5 common pitfalls to avoid to save you from lead scoring heartbreak.

Deciding whether, when, or how to implement lead scoring can be somewhat like an ill-fated love affair—it’s complicated. Lead scoring when approached at the right time and effectively maintained can be glorious; but, when implemented at the wrong time, or for the wrong reasons, can be equally as devastating.

Here are 5 common pitfalls to avoid to save you from lead scoring heartbreak.

1. Your sales org doesn’t work existing leads or doesn’t have enough leads today. Ok you caught me, these are technically two different problems. But both are signals that your time and energy should be spent elsewhere before investing in launching lead scoring. I know what you might be thinking, “implementing lead scoring will help improve our relationship with sales, so it should be a priority project.” While I’m all for tighter marketing and sales alignment for the sake of efficient revenue growth, there are inherently deeper problems at play here that must be addressed before turning to scoring. If your sales team isn’t working the existing leads you send them, then this is a sign of mistrust that will likely carry over to even the highest scored leads you send them. In this scenario, your time would be better spent developing an ICP (ideal customer profile) and agreeing with sales leadership on SLAs (service level agreements) such as: what criteria must be present to send a lead to sales? And how soon upon receiving a lead must sales follow-up? Maybe your sales team follows up on leads, but they simply don’t have enough to keep them busy. This is another problem that lead scoring will only exacerbate by sending them even less leads (cringe face emoji). The effort and resources in this scenario should instead be invested in building more consistent lead generation channels. How do you know if your reps have enough leads? While the ideal volume of leads per Sales Development Rep will vary depending on average deal size they are chasing, a good rule of thumb is ~300 leads per month for an SMB selling motion. Once you get north of 3-400 leads/rep/month, it becomes increasingly difficult for a rep to a) spend the amount of time needed to properly research and personalize initial outreach for each new lead and b) invest enough multi-channel touches on leads you sent over the past several weeks in order to increase their chances of booking a meeting. If you’re generating more than 400 leads/rep/month, then perhaps it is time to start thinking about lead scoring.
   

2. You don’t have any clean or reliable data enrichment tools or processes. What is it they say about leveraging systems like CRMs or MAS platforms effectively? Garbage in, garbage out? If your operations team hasn’t invested in tools or processes to help clean, enrich, and maintain data against your leads as they enter your database then your scoring logic will either not have enough inputs to stand it up, or will be inherently flawed. After developing your ICP criteria including both firmographic (company level) and demographic (persona level) insights, audit your current database to see how much of this data you have, and how much of it is reliable. It may be worth investing in tools to enrich, clean, and standardize your data before investing too heavily into lead scoring.
   

3. Your team is developing scoring logic in a silo. While taking this approach may come with the best of intentions, such as not wanting to take sellers away from selling to collaborate on operational lead scoring models—this will only set you up for failure. There are a lot of factors to consider when it comes to appropriate inputs to incorporate into your scoring logic, and this should be approached in a highly collaborative manner across operations, marketing and sales leadership.
   

4. You’re biting off more than you can chew. Custom models for new business! Customer expansion and upsell models! Models for different segments of the business like SMB vs Enterprise! Models for different product lines! We want it all! There are many options available to your organization now that you’ve decided to invest in lead scoring. Like any big hairy goal, it’s best to walk before you run. Implementing your first scoring model will require a lot of time and energy to analyze, pressure test, implement, and launch. It’s great to know that you can customize and introduce more complex logic down the road, but in this scenario I’d strongly advise picking the area where you need the most support—for example sending better quality inbound leads to your SDR team to increase their lead to opportunity conversion rate—and sticking with it until you’ve achieve the results you are after before introducing more complex logic. Another thing to consider is that while a couple of different models may make a lot of sense in the long run, you may not yet have enough data to train an effective lead scoring model when segmenting your audiences at this more granular level.
   

5. You’re developing or implementing a score that is “black box”. There are a number of platforms out there that can produce a lead score on your behalf should you choose that path vs building and maintaining a model internally. This is not necessarily a bad idea if you don’t have the analytical team to help you execute, but one thing to look out for is a method that is “black box” meaning you can see inputs and outputs, but not how the results were calculated. There are many problems with this method. If you can’t see which input may be throwing off the validity of your model or your sales team can’t see which attributes contributed to their high score, it can make the scoring logic difficult to trust. Simply put: you should be able to look under the hood to see what’s causing your engine to smoke if you want to arrive safely and on time to your destination.
   

I don’t want to come across as a naysayer here. When you are ready to launch your lead scoring program, it’s an exciting time! You should be proud of the analysis, internal alignment, training, and hard work it took to get to this place. But remember (and remind others within your organization) that like even the best relationships, not everything will be perfect and a lot of TLC should be invested over time to ensure your scoring model continues to mature along with your organization.