Developing an effective lead scoring model

The sales process has only become more complex, dynamic, and layered in recent years, and sellers need a way to weed through every little interaction to find the customers who are most likely to successfully close deals—otherwise, it’s hard to know what to prioritize, and it can be easy to waste time chasing low-quality leads with little to no payoff in the end. Instead of working inefficiently and without direction, some careful planning and strategy can keep marketing and sales activities on track to close sales with ease.  

Dynamics 365 Marketing hosts a variety of tools that can facilitate collaboration between sales and marketing teams that allow them to jointly direct efforts to just the right audiences for tangible successes. Creating lead scoring models in Dynamics 365 Marketing allows users to set and define specific actions that contacts can take that automatically scores the quality of each lead using predefined, customized rules. Scoring leads allows users to focus on the most quality prospects by cutting through cluttered sales pipelines and highlighting each lead’s progress towards becoming sales ready. Measure audience behavior and actions that accumulate over time until enough passive interaction has occurred to prompt a salesperson to reach out.  

Why should you use lead scoring models?

Lead scoring models are helpful tools that autogenerate a score to indicate each contact or account’s likelihood of closing a deal based on interactions with websites, emails, events, and more. An aggregated number of positive interactions push leads toward becoming sales ready once they cross into a defined threshold of points, evaluating how much interaction a user has had with your business and if these interactions make them more likely to reach a point of potential sale.  

Keep track of contacts and accounts tied to leads using user-defined behavior evaluations and a corresponding scoring system- actions like clicking emails, event registrations, or website visits all earn leads points that eventually add up if they have generated enough positive interaction for a salesperson to reach out in confidence. Interactions are given scorable values which total to a “sales ready score”—indicating when enough interest has been generated to meet a set value that then puts the lead on a salesperson’s radar to reach out to them to close the sale. Following the specified rules of the model, activities like opening emails, visiting a landing page, submitting a form, or attending a webinar can add points and raise the lead score. Similarly, though, certain activities like unsubscribing from newsletters or a period of inactivity can subtract points and lower the overall lead score.  

Advanced lead scoring conditions can factor in miniscule values as well. Entities can be set up for action events called traversals, which jump across interactions and profiles to custom-create conditions that contacts can meet to facilitate more complex, layered scenarios within the lead scoring model. Advanced conditions could score leads whose contacts have a particular email address (like a Microsoft email account), or accounts that have a particular number of employees at the associated company. 

Check out our blog post for a step-by-step guide to creating lead models.  

Taking advantage of predictive lead scoring

One way to fine-tune scoring models is to utilize predictive lead scoring, which uses insight from recent qualified and disqualified leads to automate scores for all open leads. The predictive machine learning abilities pull data from your successes and growth points so your algorithm operates on what it knows will work best, and “retrains” every fifteen days so only the most up-to-date lead data is considered when calibrating predictive scores. Custom attributes can also be attached to advanced scoring models to track customer behavior across multiple avenues or lines of business within the sales process.  

Note that automatic lead scoring only works for leads that are associated with an existing contact—contacts can easily be created and edited within Dynamics 365 Marketing and implemented within interactive marketing tools like lead scoring models, email campaigns, and customer journeys.  

What to include in a scoring model

To make lead scoring models a best-fit solution for your business, be sure to keep in mind specific sales goals, KPIs, and other valuable action items that can culminate into valuable target points in a lead scoring model. Specific metrics that could be helpful include where contacts opted-in on your website, which links they’ve clicked, specific products or pages they’ve viewed, or if leads are connected to existing contacts. The more customized a model is to your unique business processes and marketing materials, the more accurate results will be in terms of their ability to reflect real customer interest in closing a sale.  

One way to get the most out of scoring models is to take full advantage of the other Dynamics 365 Marketing tools that affect leads in various ways; marketing forms, emails, customer journeys, and redirect URL clicks can all be utilized to gauge customer behavior and their likelihood to take strong interest in your business.  

Other things to note

Effective marketing strategies and tactics are designed to cultivate enough interest to make sure each sales-focused interaction has a stable foundation. Lead nurturing is an important process that invests in the potential of new leads until they become qualified, and lead scoring models can be an incredibly helpful tool that take the guesswork out of the lead timeline until they are of a certain quality and certainty of closing a sale. When used correctly, models have the ability to pinpoint which contacts and accounts are the most interested in your business, so salespeople and marketers can direct their efforts to the audiences that count.  

Another crucial detail to keep in mind is that success isn’t static—lead scoring models should be adjusted regularly to reflect the accuracy in which scores were able to nurture leads. Comparing successfully closed leads with the scores they received can evaluate which elements of the model are best suited to capture the strengths and weaknesses of each lead and ultimately help calculate which leads are the most likely to close successfully. 

Get started

Lead scoring can be an effective tool to organize your sales pipeline and prioritize qualified leads with ease. Looking to elevate your marketing and sales strategies? Get in contact with our Dynamics 365 Marketing team to learn how to maximize your use of Dynamics 365 Marketing and its wide array of tools.