What is Lead Scoring and how can you set it up within HubSpot?

Find out what lead scoring is and how to set it up from HubSpot, what it's for, its benefits to your buyer personas and customer experience.

Every day in our companies we encounter many scenarios with prospects. They usually come to our shops, showrooms, visited our company but in the end they left because they were interested in buying our products or services. It is at that moment when qualifying our prospects becomes a priority.

This happens very often, day in and day out, every month of the year. But amidst all the uncertainty there are always ideas or initiatives that revolutionise the way we view our prospects and one of those ideas that stood out in the industry was Inbound Marketing methodologies and marketing automation. 

It is important to consider that within the inbound marketing methodology, every lead has a nurturing process. Therefore, even if a contact or prospect is not currently of high value, this does not mean that it could not become one. Of course, this would need the proper nurturing process of valuable content to be properly qualified.

In this blog we will address a technical tool of marketing automation, Lead Scoring, what it is used for, the processes it automates, functionalities and its benefits to the Buyer Persona and customer experience. As a use case its configuration within HubSpot.

• What is Lead Scoring?
• How to configure Lead Scoring within HubSpot?
• Types of use of HubSpot Lead Scoring and processes it automates.
• Benefits of HubSpot Lead Scoring: buyer persona, workflows, content personalisation, savings, sales, data.
• Why it is important to improve customer experience.

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is a technical marketing automation tool that uses various types of commercial criteria to qualify both prospects and buyer personas for our companies. The lead evaluation criteria can depend on many factors.

There are many companies that operate in multiple industries and each of them have different B2B or B2C buyer personas. It is therefore essential to map your company's buyer personas as a first step. Subsequently, evaluate together with your commercial teams (sales, marketing and service) the buyer personas and make an analysis of their characteristics and the criteria that make them high-value, medium-value or low-value.

Some of these may be of a nature: 

• Demographics.
• Purchasing criteria.
• Event attendance.
• Content download.
• Company characteristics (in case your customers are B2B).
• Interaction with the content you receive from your company, both on social media and online.
• Response to emails.

How to configure Lead Scoring within HubSpot?

HubSpot is a CRM platform which is responsible for managing the relationship that your company maintains with its customers. Within its management modules there is the ability to create and develop properties aimed at managing contacts (customers and prospects), companies, deals, products and service management. 

Among HubSpot's properties there is one previously created within its software with the objective of managing and configuring all the criteria that your company needs to evaluate your buyer personas. It is called HubSpot Score.

In case your company has not made an evaluation of your leads before, it is possible to do it by dividing the amount of leads your company gets by the amount of leads you win.

When you start with the lead score configuration within HubSpot. It is possible to divide the scoring criteria in two ways: 

Positive Criteria: With these you highlight their commitment to the company. The interactions they make, the webinars they have attended, if they have had the intention of downloading and viewing content related to your company, among other valuable characteristics. 

Negative Criteria: Negative scoring highlights lack of interaction and other characteristics that may detract a contact from being a qualified lead. They can vary according to industries but it is important to establish them because they work as an important filter to separate fake leads from the buyer personas of your business.

HubSpot Lead Scoring Usage Types

Lead Scoring, in addition to scoring the company's prospects and customers, is also one of the most important marketing automation tools for the following reasons:

• It exerts power over marketing automation, which helps to profile the efforts of the sales and direct them to buyer personas. 
• It keeps the contacts in the company's database under constant evaluation.
• Lead scoring identifies and filters leads, marketing leads and sales leads, making it possible to know in which stages of nutrition of the inbound methodology the prospects are.

Benefits of HubSpot Lead Scoring: buyer persona, workflows, content personalisation, savings, sales, data.

Lead scoring is a fundamental part of any company's marketing strategy. Some of the management areas that generate the most value to the company and as I mentioned before within the HubSpot CRM are the following:

• Buyer Persona: No Buyer Persona within a company can be considered well developed without a qualification that keeps them well profiled and stands out from the rest of the online audiences.
• Workflows: For each business rule, a certain number of processes must currently be performed. Within HubSpot's automation module there are workflows, which aim to automate these rules.
  
  Through HubSpot score, it is possible to automate multiple rules and define them according to rating scores. This helps to tailor these business rules in a personalised way.
• Content personalisation: Content today is crucial for any business to stay relevant to its audiences. Through lead scoring, companies can tailor which segments of their prospects to nurture with valuable content specific to their stage in the awareness, consideration and decision making process within the inbound methodology.
• Savings for the company: When a company is able to qualify its prospects, it is able to better segment its communication strategies, as in the case of using social media advertising.
  
  Knowing what characterises your buyer persona avoids generating unnecessary expenses. Large global companies such as Tesla use it to avoid spending on advertising. 
• Sales: In the case of sales it is crucial to have strategies aligned with marketing to define in which lead score ranges a prospect differs from a subscriber, to a lead, to an MQL or a SQL. 
• Database automation: For a company it makes a big difference to know that within the database they generate to know how many of those contacts are marketable contacts and how many of the company's other contacts need to be worked differently.
  
  The lead score helps to clean and determine that information. This in the medium to long term works as a way to help sales to prospect and sell. 

Why lead scoring is important to improve the customer experience.

Lead scoring is a tool that is constantly worked into a company's monthly and annual planning. This additionally collaterally improves the customer experience because by being clear about the value of our prospects we can understand what type of content is relevant to them according to the stage of the customer lifecycle they have with our brand.

If you are interested in learning even more about how to properly qualify your prospects and customers schedule a space with our team at Imagineer.