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The Digital Utopia Podcast Episode #22

What is Lead Scoring and How it Supports Your Sales Team

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About the podcast

The Digital Utopia Podcast is for SMB Marketers and Business Leaders looking to align their Marketing, Sales, and Service departments so they’re part of one powerhouse growth team.

Each episode will dive into the strategies, philosophies, and tools that will change your approach to organizational growth, give you renewed focus and clarity, and allow you to build a brand that not only helps you stand out—but win.

The Digital Utopia Podcast is produced by Digitopia and hosted by Frank Cowell and Joseph Freeman.

Episode transcription

Frank
When you get to a place where your lead flow is such that you overwhelm your sales team, you now need to make sure they're spending their time on the leads that are most likely to turn into real opportunities. It's an efficiency game. It's an ROI game.

Intro
You are listening to the digital utopia podcast, a resource dedicated to helping b2b leadership and executives gain clarity and focus in a chaotic marketplace.

Frank
Hey, gang, welcome to the digital utopia podcast episode 22. I'm your host, Frank Cowell, I'm joined by my co host,

Joe
Joseph Freeman.

Frank
We've had a spirited discussion this morning about lead scoring, and I'm happy to bring this to everyone today. Joe, we're excited. We were like we may have like hope we didn't like do the whole show already.

Joe
Well, I'm excited to see where the show goes. Because we disagreed on so many things. I love it. I love it. disagreements. Oh, here comes

Frank
at I've been doing this voice all morning. This the movie man voice right? This summer lead scoring. So we're going to that may happen today. I'm on one today. I'm like, I'm feeling real goofy and silly. So let's jump into lead scoring though. I have opinions. You have opinions? Mine are probably more correct. But let's let's do this man. Is is my story of my life.

Joe
All right. So let's talk about why. Right What what it is, I guess we should probably define it. And then let's talk about why we would do it when we're going to use it. And then we can talk through some of the attributes that we would want to include in our lead scoring criteria. Is that sound good?

Frank
Beautiful, beautiful. Okay, yeah, let's go back. When you say what and the why we want to make sure in there we kind of go to like, let's go real fledgling with some people's programs. And like what that looks like it early stage when they have like, five leads coming in per week. Right. So let's make sure we talk about that. And because I think part of this is not everybody needs lead scoring. That's like the big thing, too. So let's jump in.

Joe
Let's talk about what what is lead scoring?

Frank
Yeah. So lead scoring is a way for you to take the leads that you have in your database and score them based on various criteria, we're going to get into what that criteria is in a moment. But the idea is that when you have a lot of leads in your database, your sales team needs to prioritize which leads they're going to be reaching out to and which leads are going to engage in which leads, they're going to kind of just let simmer. Okay. That's the whole point to make your sales team as efficient as possible, and connect with the people that are as ripe as possible if you Oh,

Joe
yeah, I think there's two things we need to talk about too. One, there's manual lead scoring. And that's what we are actually going to be defining today, right? How do you set it up, if you're just going to kind of manually put in place some criteria to help you understand who's hot, who's not, right. A lot of systems also have some AI built in, where they look, especially if you have a whole bunch of data coming in a whole bunch of leads a whole bunch of visitors to your website, if that is to the point where there's enough data, the AI kicks in and can actually help you lead score without lifting a finger. Yeah, it understands based on patterns of people who have bought from you, what to look for in new prospects. And so we're not going to touch on that today. But that does exist, I just want to put that out there.

Frank
I would like to add to that. And I agree with you, that's not worth touching on. I would like to add a lot of this supposedly AI and I'm doing air quotes here. But a lot of this supposedly AI that's out there today, or just or just general algorithms, you know, there's a lot of stuff people are calling AI today, it's not really AI. And then would also say a lot of the stuff that's being applied in terms of AI, it's really not necessary for most organizations, right, like, in order for what you just described to be really valuable in to really work, the amount of deal volume, the amount of customers and flow, it needs to be heavy, like you have to have a lot of deal flow, you have to have a lot of volume, to then be able to be predictive. When again, when you're if your company has 50 leads coming in per week, that there really isn't any AI that's going to help you,

Joe
especially if only a very small percentage of those are turning into actual customers because it really relies on understanding who made it all the way to the finish line. To paint a picture of what future prospects behavior should look like, right?

Frank
Like if your success in your company is four to 10 deals a month, you're not gonna have enough volume to really have quote unquote, Ai, you know, help you there.

Joe
Okay, so we said it, it's out of the way we're not going to be talking about AI we're going to be talking about manual lead scoring today and paired

Frank
with automation, right, like you're manually defined and then then it can run on its

Joe
own share, but it's basically your brains being put into action digitally. It's not a computer your

Frank
rules your criteria for your organization. Here we go. There you go. So

Joe
why do you need to lead score you kind of touched on it already, but why don't you you know, officially, tell us why

Frank
sorry. That mean bumping things around here, the reason you need it is, when you get to a place where your lead flow is such that you overwhelm your sales team, you now need to make sure they're spending their time on the most realistic most likely to close leads the leads that are most likely to turn into real opportunities. Okay, it's an efficiency game. It's an ROI game. Now, I said something that I think is really important, which I touched on at the beginning. If you don't have a lead flow, that's overwhelming your sales team, I will not look to lead scoring as some tool that you desperately need in your business at that moment in time. What I've always said, Look, if you're getting five leads per week, called the damn leads, get in front of them, there's not so much flow there, that you can't just manually manage that. Right. So I want to I want our listeners to be really clear, don't attempt to mess with some of these technologies and these features and these platforms until you're ready. Right? If you only need four deals per month in your business, that probably equates to when you extrapolate out to opportunities, maybe that's eight opportunities, let's say you close 50%. Okay, let's go backwards. Let's say you need 20 conversations, right? That doesn't require AI and a bunch of automation and lead scoring and all this other stuff, just call the leads, get in front of them. When you get to a point where your deal volume, and thus then your lead volume starts to overwhelm your sales team, you now can use some of these technologies that we've talked about in other episodes, and that we'll continue to talk about, you can use some of these technologies, such as lead scoring, to help your sales team understand which of those leads should I be focusing on, you know, if there's a pool of 100 that came in, which are the 25, I should really pay attention to. Because if I spend my time trying to comb through all 100 this week, you know, I might miss someone who's really hot. And so the lead scoring helps you prioritize helps your sales team prioritize.

Joe
Yeah, absolutely. You know, we also use it I'm jumping ahead a little bit here. But we also use it to quickly identify somebody who is basically raising their hand, because that'll pop it right to the top of the salespersons list. Even if there's no other criteria in place. Having that could be one good place to start. We'll get into the details of that in a minute, our

Frank
criteria. And that's what our listeners should understand today. Is that the criteria on this is everything. The criteria is everything, like from a profile standpoint, and from a behavioral standpoint, which I know we're going to get into.

Joe
Yeah, well, let's get into it. So great. Let's talk about attributes of lead scoring. So there's all kinds of things that you can lead scoring, depending on the software that you're using, you can tap into all kinds of both explicit and implicit behavioral data. So let's start with the explicit type of information. So the stuff the information that you are getting into your database that is being offered to you, for instance, through a form fill, right? Let's talk about what type of information you would want to attach to a lead score that somebody might fill out on a form.

Frank
Yeah, so one thing I want to say I like what you said, explicit, implicit. I like those lenses. The other lens I would give to people, if it's helpful is profile information versus behavioral, you know, information. And those are kind of like the two big buckets. I like what you said about implicit because what that means is not just from their behavior, but some of these other technologies might be able to imply some additional information that's not even based on the behavior. So I like that. I've always just used like profile versus behavioral data, just as a simple way to understand it. But you're right, there's explicit and implicit. So let's talk about the explicit mostly around the profile information. What do we mean by profile information, we mean the information, you know about that person, the fields of information, their name, their email, address, the company, the website, address, the company size, their job title, their role in the organization, their biggest goals, their needs, things that they may fill out on a form things that you may glean from various online interactions, in addition to any of that data that your software that whatever you're using, can go out and get for you. So for example, one of the pieces of software we use, we don't necessarily have to ask them for their company size, because if they just give us their corporate email address, our the software we use will determine the domain and then from the domain, it'll determine the company and from the company had to go and find what do we know publicly about this company? What's the size range? So that's super helpful. So you can use some of these tools to get information that profile data The explicit information, even if the person didn't provide it to you themselves. That's the explicit data, right? In like database terms or in programming terms, we would call that discrete data, right? specific fields of data on this person, whether they gave it to you or you have tech that goes and finds it out for you and fills in those boxes,

Joe
can we stop there just take a little bit of a sidestep. Because I think this is really important. When we work with companies, we often find that in their forms, they're asking all kinds of information, right? first name, last name, email address, those are good. But then they ask firstborn dog. Well, not even that, though. They're asking for company name, right asking for Are you in the US? They're asking for company size? How many employees do you have? What is your revenue? There's, like, all kinds of information they're asking for that actually, you can get behind the scenes. And you started to touch on there. And I think that needs to be said, because you can take your 12 question form in most cases, and pare it down to like four questions. And you can get whether or not they're in the US through the IP address that they filled out. And that is information that usually is available to you in these softwares that you may have never tapped into. Yeah, you can get that in Salesforce and HubSpot and all these things, you know, are they in the US, you can even get company size, you can imply company size, because it will go and look up public records on the company's revenue that is either reported or assumed. And then you can just have some math in the back kind of do the division and say, I think that's about 15 employees, or I think that's about 350. Correct. You can do all that.

Frank
Yeah, I think that's a good point you bring up because we talked about this in a just briefly in a past episode, where we just live in a world where we as consumers of anything, whether it's b2b or b2c, whatever, we don't like having to give information that we've either already given or we think you as a brand should already know. And so when we're talking about like, all this information, you're talking about that people put on the forums, you should be able to get that without having to burden the user burden the person who's filling out by the way, the more fields you add hurts your conversion, by the way,

Joe
it does. And let me give you a real example here. So we came across a form. That was what I said, never smiled out in the wild form out in the wild, first name, last name, email address, phone number, company name, company website. Right?

Frank
So let me guess was it for like an ebook?

Joe
No, this was a legitimate Actually, this was more of a bottom of the funnel format. There was a reason for them to ask these questions. But then they went on, what is your job title? What is your job role? What is what are you interested in? Right? So all of these different, all of these different fields, and I think we were up to like 14, or maybe 17 fields. Good Lord, we ended up paring it down, I believe two, four, maybe five fields, we got their first name and last name, which we want. We got their email address, we dropped the company name, and we dropped the company website, because we could imply those from the email address, right? Especially if you're forcing, you know, corporate domains. And that's what we had to do. So we made it so that you couldn't put in a Yahoo, you couldn't put a Hotmail, you had to put in an email address that was associated with a custom business domain. But that was a small step we took to get rid of two fields right there, right. We also got rid of title because people type in whatever they want people put you know, I'm the Chief Officer of how everything right, sir. And they may really be that but that doesn't help us very much. So right, we took that off and pared it down to just a simple drop down, you are one of three that we care about or your other. Right. And then we were able to take off also, what are you interested in? Because we were able to imply by the pages that they were looking at what they were interested, yeah. So if they went to the page that had all the features of security, we knew they were interested in security, if they went to the pages, and this was for an IT company, by the way, if they went to the pages that were all about, you know, cloud servers, then we knew they were interested in Cloud Service, we didn't have to ask them and we might be wrong. But it lowered the barrier of entry. So taking that from like 14, or 17. Fields down to five, really makes it a less daunting form.

Frank
I'm also a fan of just simply asking, you could ask one question like, what's the biggest thing you're looking to solve right now? Or what's the biggest thing you hope we can help you solve? just literally a simple question? And like you said, you don't have to go into all these dirty details that that one answer is going to tell you on the other thing, I think we're This is a little off topic of lead scoring. But since we talked about conversion, I think where people miss the opportunity is to just get the basic information. You know, allow them to self select an appointment. And then as part of that follow up process where you start to create an amazing experience for that person. The follow up could be looking forward to the appointment, by the way beforehand, please fill out this survey. So that way, we can have that initial call that's very well informed, right. So now you can see Step it along, instead of trying to get that all in your first let's just make an appointment. Right? Right. The same thing where you go to the doctor's office, you just schedule the appointment, then when you get there, you got to tell them about, you know, your family history and all this other stuff. So in a similar fashion, like, get the appointment going, and then start to create an amazing experience by following up.

Joe
And speaking of doctors, how come every time I have appointments at 10 o'clock? I don't actually see him till 11:45.

Frank
Yeah, because you know that,

Joe
if we did that to our customers that we would have no customers.

Frank
I think in most industries, you would have no customers if you did that. But but but you actually were joking around here. But this is a really important point to make. The reason doctors can get away with it is because you desperately need them. So one thing I've always told business people is how can you make yourself the doctor of your industry, not because you're looking to abuse your clients and make them wait around an hour and 45 minutes past their appointment time. But because you can architect a situation where you're so darn good that your clients desperately need you. If you can architect that and create that kind of value. You turn the tables on the customer vendor dynamic.

Joe
Yeah, they will sit around and wait for you for two, three hours. And while they're doing it, they'll also fill out 700 lines of current information they wouldn't give anybody

Frank
and by the way, when that doctor fixes whatever ails you, who says thank you, the doctor doesn't say thank you for your business. You say? Thank you, doctor. Thank you. Right? That's what you should be aiming for in business is how can you create a situation? And I'm not suggesting you don't say thank you to your clients. But what I'm saying is, how can you architect a situation to where it's so obvious? Who says thank you first?

Joe
I'm bringing this back now? Good. Let's do it. So we were talking about explicit type of data you could be scoring off of Yep. I want to talk a little bit about the implicit stuff now. And you said it was behavioral versus would you say?

Frank
Well, so behavioral is kind of how I look at most of the implicit stuff, you certainly can use some of the tech to start telling you other things. Most of that, in my opinion goes to the explicit data, right? Regardless of who'd like

Joe
the country they came from, and then what I was saying earlier,

Frank
right, I mean, I wouldn't call that implicit because it's explicit data. It's just the user didn't give it to you, your software went and got it for you.

Joe
I agree with that.

Frank
So mostly, when we're talking about employee, mostly, when we're talking about implicit, we're talking about behavioral now that you know who this person is. And maybe from a profile standpoint, they match what you would hope is a qualified lead. Now, the other part of that is, what is their behavior? What are they doing? How many pages did they visit on your website? What kind of forms did they fill out? Did they actually fill out a contact us or set an appointment kind of form? Like, what is the behavior? Because if, if their behavior was only that they subscribe to your blog, even though from a profile standpoint, it looks good, they're not showing you the behavior that there are, that they're ready? Right, right. So you're going to want to figure out how much of that behavior then starts to be a signal for your sales team, that it's time to reach out, it's time to now proactively get in front of this person, or it could be reactively, if they filled out, you know, a contact us set an appointment kind of form. But what is the signal that the salesperson needs to get in touch with this person?

Joe
Right? So here's a few ideas you could be looking for, have they visited 30 plus pages on your site that would want you want to bump up their lead score for that you might want to look for, you know, have they revisited your website multiple times in the last seven days, you'd want to bump it up for that just because they came once doesn't mean a whole lot. But if they came once, and then you see that three days later, they came again, and you see that they came again, you know, a fourth day, you might give them five more points for that. Right? So those would be a couple of examples of implicit type of behavioral data that you can be scoring on.

Frank
Yeah, and how about if they attended a webinar, which is kind of this in between behavior, right, visiting pages is easy opening emails is easy. And then you have the other end of the spectrum where they say, I want to talk to you, we are very like, that's, that's hot, right. But if you have something like a webinar, or a really long on demand kind of webinar video, and they spend 30 minutes 45 an hour, hour and a half in this webinar, in this video, that behavior is really telling, right you might have in your software, if they make it only 10 minutes, and it's a certain score, but if they make it 30 minutes, maybe 60 minutes into this thing, and they're still around that that's, that's a massive signal to that there's interest, right? That behavior is very telling.

Joe
So let's talk a little bit about how your sales and marketing team actually decide and agree upon what the scores are. How do we actually break this down? So we've talked about what you can score on but what are the scores? Is there a tried and true scale we should be working off of

Frank
there is not there are just simply recommendations and you like many things, have to play with it and see what works for your organization. But let's talk about the profile stuff first. So that stuff in my opinion is pretty easy. And so what you want to do is that marketing needs to agree with sales. what's the what's the profile information that we need to hand you? And what is the level or criteria for each of those for us to say it's profile qualified, okay? And so marketing and sales agreeing upon that now, we talked about this in a past episode. And I would highly recommend that our listeners do research on this, if in listen to our past episodes, if they're not clear on like, what is in them QL. what's different between mq and SQL? Let's just summarize that in mq L is when a lead is qualified at a distance. So many organizations get confused. They think, oh, marketing, qualified lead means they're just a qualified lead. And there's a difference between marketing qualified and sales qualified lead. Marketing qualifies it at a distance, meaning nobody's talked to this person. But based on the profile information, and based on the behavior, this is marketing qualified, it's someone that is worth investigating. There's no guarantee that this is qualified for an opportunity. Sales qualified is sales now looks at it, a human looks at it, in vetted out. And if the human looks at it and says, Yes, this profile data is good. And yes, this behavioral criteria is good, boom, that's sales qualified, right? It might even be a conversation that they have, they're just brief conversation, it could include talking, but a human vet, that's that out. That's different. So when we say marketing, qualified, it's important for marketing and sales to understand, we're not looking for contacts that are necessarily saying, I'm ready to buy. So getting those two teams to agree on what that profile data is for that scenario, then there's the behavioral stuff. And so I think you have a ton of experience around this on like, now scoring that, because that's where your scoring comes in, right? Like the behavioral stuff, the profile stuff almost becomes like a checkbox, right? It's the checkbox. And now you have the score, together the checkbox of the profile being a match, and the score creates SQL.

Joe
Right? So let's paint a real picture here. And let's start pretty simple. One of the easiest ways you can score right out the gate is first of all, if you have a lead that matches your, you know, kind of demographic needs, right, that it's the right company size, it's it's the right location, those types of things, you can now start leave school before it before you do that. So

Frank
I mentioned that that's kind of a checkbox, like the profile data check and matches, you could you could just say it's just a check mark and and combine that with lead scoring, or you can just make that like a base part of your lead scoring, which is I think, kind of what you talked about you like their profile match, maybe that gives them 25 points, for example. Or you could just say, No, there's no points associated with that. We're just gonna, like, that's a checkbox, and it's a checkbox and this other scoring criteria, whichever works for your organization, it could be either,

Joe
which I think that's fine. I think that the lead scoring can can jump in only after they meet the basic criteria,

Frank
right? Like, it's only behavioral stuff, right?

Joe
So if we're talking only behavioral, then I would say, let's just use 100 as the Mecca, right? You're trying to get them to 100. And if they get to 100, you're going to pass them off to the sales team to start investigating, which

Frank
I think is a good number, right? We're all used to 100 scale.

Joe
I'm gonna use 104, just because you said that,

Frank
yeah, I yeah, that works, too.

Joe
So back to 100, what we usually do is we set up all of the high intent, you know, ready now sort of behaviors as 100 right away. So if they fill out a contact form, you got to contact them, even if they are a vendor, you got to look at them, right? You can then weed them out. But you've got to look at all of these. So and

Frank
by the way, in that scenario, Joe, they may match the 100. And so boom, you got to contact them. But you would have information right away that saying, hey, it wasn't profile, like they're not profile qualified.

Joe
Yeah. So you may not need to contact them. Maybe I misspoke. But you do need to look at it.

Frank
Well, you that needs to go in front of the sales, I wouldn't say that's good information. So that way, the person calling, right knows, like ahead of time, like, Oh, we've got the behavioral match, but we don't have the profile match, we're gonna reach out but we're going in with the right expectations.

Joe
Okay. So contact forms, literally contact forms, like the ones that say, hey, I want to talk to you support forms if you had any of those on your site. And that may be a whole nother conversation that goes into a support system. But assuming that you're using the same system, anything that somebody is raising their hand and saying, Can we please talk, you should give them a score of 100. And you should immediately trigger that over to the sales team.

Frank
Yeah, I think you're dead on it's contact level forms, request a quote, start a project or a consultation, whatever you call that in your business,

Joe
watch a demo. All of those things are an immediate 100 they go to the sales team.

Frank
Oh, that's a great one. Schedule a demo, right? Like, that's like a, we're trying to get hooked up with a human on your team to like, give me a demo or give me a console.

Joe
Yep. If they don't raise their hand immediately. Now we start to get into building a lead score. You don't just get handed 100 now you have to build it. You With fives and 10s and 15, for different behaviors that you take, and this is where it gets really personal. And you have to work directly with your sales and marketing teams, kind of together to understand what you think is based on past lead behavior, if you have that data, or if you even have that, anecdotally, you can start to map this out a bit. So some examples might be they visit I said this earlier, they visited the site and consumed 30 pages, you know, I'd give them probably 10 points for that. And I'm pulling some numbers out of the air here. But just to build a case, I'd give him 10 points for that. In addition to that, they went and watched a webinar. Now, they haven't talked to anybody they didn't ask to be talked to, but they went and watched a webinar, I may give them another 50 points for that, right, because that's, that's pretty that, that is currency there times currency. And they are giving you they're paying you in some way.

Frank
And going back to what we said earlier, which is you can even depending on your software, vary those points based on how deep they got into that video. That's a good point, that webinar,

Joe
right, so maybe they get, you know, 50 points for watching the whole thing, and only 25 of them make it halfway through, right. But in my example, now they're up to 60. And then on top of that, they come back and start revisiting the website multiple times in a three day period. Okay, so I might give them another 25 points for that, because that feels like they're really warming up, they're really starting to feel like and then I might give them another 25 points if they go and look at my pricing page more than once. Because now I feel like they're really starting to understand whether or not they want to have a conversation. And at that point, it's almost just like being in a real physical store, where you see the person chopping around, and then you see him like look at the price tag and you kind of want to swoop in, you want to say like, Hey, you like that jacket? Right?

Frank
Yeah, I think you bring up a good point. And that's the types of pages on your site that they're visiting. Visiting can also vary your lead scoring. So if they're looking at your blog quite a bit, you know, maybe that's lower scored. But if they go to your products or services pages, and they go to your, you know how it works pages, and they go to like you said pricing like that's high intent, those are high intent pages. So you might apply 10 points for each of those page views,

Joe
for example, and you just said kind of the magic words, I think what we do, and we have a sheet where we kind of map all this out, before we implement it, what we do is we go through and say what are the most important pages that would indicate somebody is interested and we give those pages high scores. And then we have another tear down, which is what are the ones that kind of support them doing a deeper dive, we give those a little bit less, and then all the rest, maybe get one point or nine points, I don't know, it depends on on your situation. But in my example, I think we just got up to like 105, or something. So as soon as it are 110. So as soon as it trips that 100, it goes to the salesperson. Now in that example, they didn't say please contact me. They didn't say I want to start a project or see a demo, they didn't actually raise their hand. But they did everything that we would think somebody who's curious and wanting to buy did. So we're going to now proactively reach out to them.

Frank
Correct. And this is where I think marketing and sales teams need an understanding that sales teams still have to proactively reach out to people. Right? I mean, that's just part of what sales has done for eons that doesn't go away in this magical world of content and automation and all these other things. Yeah, you still have to practically reach out to people and initiate conversations, what we're saying is, some of those people will be proactively themselves saying, I want to talk to you. But there's a bulk of those people that you're going to have to reach out to, and because of their behavior and what they're doing. And what we're saying is, hey, everything about this person says that your odds of having a good conversation, not saying it's going to turn to opportunity, but your odds of having a good conversation are going up dramatically based on what we know about this person and their behavior.

Joe
Now let's talk about one nuance, which is the opposite of good, which is bad, bad, bad. There's negative lead scoring too, right? So you can detract points from people if they take actions that start to feel like maybe they're not the right fit. So like here's a real example. unsubscribe, okay. unsubscribes a real one because they're starting to lose interest. But let's talk about even another one, which is, you know, we get a lot of complaints from companies that well, we got a lot of competitors, who are filling out our forms just to see how we do things, right. Or we've got a lot of vendors who fill out our contact form to to sell us something. Another one that's pretty

Frank
common, which we experienced both of those, by the way. Yeah, everybody does a great quantity.

Joe
There's another one that I hear a lot too, which is we have a lot of people looking for jobs. And they're looking at all the right pages because they're trying to understand what we do so we call it you know, we reach out to McAllen. Oh, they're looking for a job. So a way to use negative lead scoring might be if they go visit the careers page on your site more than more than once. Maybe you knock them down 50 points because what prospect is looking at the careers page, right or maybe you can You can see what websites sent them over. So if they clicked on a link from another website, you can actually see that data if you have the right software in place. And if you had a list of common like job boards, or maybe websites that you know, refer often to you, you might want to put those on and say if they come from one of those websites, then knock their lead score down, because I don't want to have my sales team accidentally calling out and trying to pitch them when they're really just looking for a job.

Frank
Yeah, that's a really smart one, by the way. Yeah, really smart one. Thank you. Yeah.

Joe
Okay, so one of the last things here I want to talk about real quick is who should be implementing lead scoring? whose job is this? And can you set it and forget it?

Frank
So I believe this is just an opinion, that it's marketing's job to establish lead scoring, why? Because so much of the behavior that's being measured, and so much of the engagement that's being driven, is initiated and handled by the marketing department. Additionally, the onus is on marketing to provide a quality contact over to sales. So marketing is the one who's responsible for ensuring that there's accuracy there. So it kind of all originates there. And so my opinion marketing handles that. Also marketing's most interested in the entire lifecycle of the customer, you know, starting from when they're a stranger and visitor all the way to becoming a fan, that marketing's most interested in that and most accountable for that. So I would say marketing owns the implementation of this, but it has to happen in partnership with sales. Right has to happen in partnership with sales,

Joe
everybody has to be agreed this goes back to the SLA, right? between your marketing and sales team. And we have an episode all about that. You know, should you be in agreement? Yes, you should absolutely be in agreement, but someone has to own this initiative.

Frank
Correct? And then to your second question, is it set and forget it? No way. In fact, I don't think anything we've talked about on this show has ever been preached as a set it and forget it, all of these things lead need love and TLC to maintenance them and keep them in working order your to your example, you might later on discover, oh, there's this other website that's referring us traffic, and we're now realizing every bit of traffic that comes from there is just, you know, not great. They're not great fits for us for whatever reason, you're gonna have to go and add that to the list that's going to update the lead score, you're gonna have to determine whether current contacts go into that score, or it's only for future contacts, like there's all these decisioning things that have to happen and maintenance things that come up that you're gonna have to be on top of that's only going to be as a result of marketing and sales continuing a good conversation and a good healthy smarketing or is Dan tired of HubSpot says marketing relationship. If that's not in place, then that lead scoring the the efficacy of it is going to erode over time. So it needs to be maintenance got to give it some love and attention. Absolutely. Good. So I think we about covered it on lead scoring. There's probably some other nuances we could go into with people if they had specific questions, but really we're just we would be diving into really specific use cases. But what we shared was the high level overview if you'd like to learn more, we've got a template actually that I believe you built that we can share with people it's not really available anywhere but like with a lot of things just shoot me an email. happy to share that template with you frank@digitopia.agency frank@digitopia.agency. Join us also in our next episode, we're going to dive deeper into this conversation around revenue operations or Reb ops for short. Join us next time would love to have you back. Thanks a lot. Have an awesome day.

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