Marketing Confession: I Never Revisit My Lead Scoring

Dear Irene,

All the best practices on lead scoring say it needs to be an iterative process. I know I’m supposed to revisit things every once in a while to make sure the model is working. I’m a marketer in the 21st century; I’m supposed to learn from the data and get better. I get it. I know.

In reality, I’m just trying to get through a mountain of work each day, and half of it is on fire. Which tends to make actually getting lead scoring right a far off dream.

Logically, I know it’s important, but it’s really hard to make lead scoring a priority without seeing results, but to see results, you need to be systematic. It’s a vicious cycle and I’m just not winning.

Any advice?

Sincerely,
Struggling to Score

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Dear Struggling to Score,

Le sigh. I think we’ve all been here. I know I have. #thestruggleisreal

And here’s what I think you can (realistically) do:

• Accept that real-world marketing is fast, messy and always just about to miss a deadline. If you’re generating qualified leads for your sales team, stop and give yourself a pat on the back. That’s way more important (and much harder to do) than putting together a fancy PPT deck outlining the “ideal” theoretical lead scoring model that will never be implemented. Save that sh*t for grad school.
• That being said, you don’t have to stagnate either. Focus on incremental changes that add up over time. Don’t think about it as “redoing your lead scoring model”; think about it as “tweaking this one thing to see if it helps”. Do that on a regular basis and you should start to see some progress.
• Put stuff in your calendar. There’s a universal truth to the typical marketer’s day: if it’s a scheduled meeting, it’s gonna happen, whether it’s useful or not. So take ten minutes right now (really, do it now) to pre-plan periodic checkpoints with sales leadership, quarterly working sessions and ten-minute monthly review cycles.
• Make sure you know where you’re going. This means you need to know your goals: how many leads do you need to generate? What conversion rate are you targeting from stage to stage? As you make those incremental adjustments, use your pre-planned monthly reviews to measure results and see which changes pushed the needle in the right direction.

You’ve been putting lead scoring on a pedestal. Stop. And finally, lean on MTS. You don’t have to do this alone. We’re here to help. Check out a couple of our resources:

• Lead Scoring Strategy and Pitfalls: A Few Things to Consider
• So, What Is Predictive Lead Scoring, and How Can It Help?
• MQL, SQL or…Plain Old Crap? How to Define Your Lead Stages

You’ve got this.

Always on your side,
Irene