4 Keys to Successful B2B Lead Scoring

Lead scoring for industrial marketers doesn’t need to be complex or mysterious for it to be effective. It needs to account for whatever in your typical buying journey triggers when a prospect transitions from interest to intent.

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Joey Strawn: 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the industrial Marketer Podcast your place for the tips, tech trends and tactics for industrials who care about driving leads to their companies. I'm one of your hosts Joey, strong industrial marketer advocate and all around friendly fella. And as always, I am joined by one of the best ever now Nels Nels and nobody else Jensen, how are you, my friend?

Nels Jensen: 0:29

I'm doing great. Glad to be with you yet again, Episode 23.

Joey Strawn: 0:34

I know we're coming up towards the end of the year, we have dedicated this entire quarter to talking about sales topics that are going to help ie whether doesn't matter what level you are in this, whether you're a C suite, pi, you're an executive person, you're a grunt worker on the ground on the marketing floor, we want to talk about things that are actually going to help sales and marketing work better together to get those industrial, b2b and manufacturing leads in the door and revenue on the books. And this is the season now that we're talking about all of that good, helpful stuff. And I couldn't be happier about it. It's the Thanksgiving time of year. I don't know when this is coming out, it will come out probably around Thanksgiving or after so happy holidays in such house, I guess.

Nels Jensen: 1:25

Yes, it's but it is that time of year, it's like get that extra cash into your accounts and from your accounts and your company and convert those leads.

Joey Strawn: 1:38

I know. Well, we have picked a very fun topic today. Because this is one that has very practical applications, which I like. But it is one that I feel that every level of marketer, C suite executive sales guy, anybody working on bringing leads into the company needs to have a good handle on. And it's something that we have been in the habit of talking with clients about recently, and over the last handful of years, but it is a fun topic of lead scoring for industrial leads. Oh Nels, I can just hear the applause. And the cheers people like pulling over in their cars that are listening going. Yes, they're doing it lead scoring? Aren't you excited?

Nels Jensen: 2:23

Everyone can do lead scoring? It's exactly right. You know, even if you don't have the, you know, marketing automation technology that you should have. But even if you don't, you can do lead scoring, it's it's pretty, it's pretty fundamental into having an efficient lead funnel, right?

Joey Strawn: 2:42

I agree. I mean, any marketer on the floor, anyone who's reading blogs, and anyone who's been on, you know, Search Engine Land, and all, you know, any, any tips and tricks and all those tools that people love to talk about, and we especially love to talk about, you've heard of lead scoring, and you know, essentially what it is now, the executives up top, you maybe you haven't heard the term lead scoring, I hope you have. But anyone who hasn't heard the term lead scoring, knows inherently what lead scoring is, it's this idea of Alright, well, I've got a bunch of leads. And some of them are, you know, logistics companies trying to sell me services, there are a handful trying to sell me sunglasses. There are some people that want my money to help get a prince into the country or do some education concept or whatever. But there are a handful of leads that are good leads that are from companies that we as a company want to work with. And they're from people at those companies that actually have a hand in making any sort of decision. And there are a lot of times when those leads need help being brought to the surface. And that's essentially what lead scoring does is it puts a numerical value into all of your leads. And in that context then brings the best leads to the surface. Isn't that fun Nels?

Nels Jensen: 4:00

Yup.

Joey Strawn: 4:00

So awesome. Now, so diving into LEAD SCORING, what do we really, really want to focus on? Obviously, there's a lot of places you can start. There's a lot of numbers, it's like, oh, what do we have to do you know, to even begin thinking about lead scoring. So there's some there's some best practices, obviously, that you want to keep in mind when you're putting a lead scoring framework together. And at the end of this episode are on the shop floor segment, Nelson, I are going to walk everybody through a handful of very specific types of lead scoring frameworks and lead scoring parameters you need to have in place. But essentially, one of the biggest elements that you need to do is you need to collect all of your leads, and identify what like identify all of your current customers and find the ones that are the best value of what are the types of companies and deals that we want to be closing with companies that we want to be working with. mean now. So you and I talk about this all the time is identifying your target market or identifying your target customer. That's essentially what we're thinking of here is looking at all the leads that have come in in the past that have been turned into those target customers, those target accounts, those revenue driving businesses, and then extrapolating, well, what were the activities? Or what were the things about those leads? That made them valuable? Why did they lead to those revenue driving businesses? I mean, we talked about that all the time, trying to identify the best audience for a piece of content or a strategy or a campaign.

Nels Jensen: 5:35

Yeah, you're, you're identifying your ideal buyer profile. Right?

Joey Strawn: 5:39

Exactly. You gotta and everybody knows, like, you can look at your leads, and you can look at your bucket of all the leads. And there's always going to be some that that rise to the top. And you know, what those are going to be? And they should, if you think about it, or if you're actually laying them out on paper, should have some qualities that align with each other, whether they're job titles, or industries, or maybe the phase of the buying cycle that they're in, they're going to have something in common. Now, I mean, Nelson, have you seen that when you're putting together like Target profiles is always like, writers?

Nels Jensen: 6:16

There's Yeah, and there's, and I think it's, it's, for some of us who are not advanced in the lead scoring game. I think it's good to point out that we're not just talking about profiles.

Joey Strawn: 6:28

No way.

Nels Jensen: 6:29

We're also talking about behaviors. Yeah, no, right. So it's not just who these folks are, who have bought from you or you think might buy from you. But there's also obviously actions that people take along their journey that show you their interest, or might lead you to somebody else. Within there, you know, it might be the engineer who's constantly looking at your materials. And he might not be the decision maker, but you know, she or he can lead you to that decision maker. So some of this is, is behavior based scoring, some of it is profile based scoring.

Joey Strawn: 7:10

I couldn't agree more, I mean, and that's honestly one of the one of the things that we're going to dive into in the second half of on in our on the shop floor segment is actually identifying some of the differences between the intrinsic, you know, lead scores and the extrinsic or explicit that they need to be looking at. And I think we're going to get some really, really good bullet points in that it's so fun, though, because some of those eyes, you talked about, like a behavior or a profile based one, you can give someone a score based on their job profile, or job title once, but behavior based, if they continue to engage or engage with at different levels in the funnel, and with different pieces that are identified at different levels in your sales process, then you can start getting advanced knowledge or advanced intent based knowledge on individual contacts. And that's essentially, one of the things you mentioned earlier is, this isn't a panoramic view, it gives us data that looks at that. But lead scoring essentially is done on a contact by contact and lead by lead basis,

Nels Jensen: 8:17

Right? So it kind of which leads to score, I'll give up let's use me as an example. I download a lot of white papers and doing research for the various things I work on. So so my behavior is probably attractive in terms of oh, that person's been on our site, they read a blog post, they done like, okay, but as soon as you figure out who I am, hey, here's somebody from a marketing agency, essentially, exactly. I'm not a good lead, you know, and exactly, people figure that out very quickly, you know, and I'm the kind of person who, honestly, when I get that 30 seconds later email from somebody, it's just I reply to say, No, thanks. I'm not, you know, I'm not gonna be a good use of your time. But so how which, which leads do you score?

Joey Strawn: 9:03

Well see? That's a very good question. Here's the here's my answer to that. And it's gonna seem daunting, but I'll talk it through all of them. So you got to score all the leads. Now, what you can do, and we're going to talk about this is give some of them a negative score. That's one of the elements of lead score that some don't apply. And I think is a very important aspect of this is, like you said, let's use your exact hypothesis or hypothetical a second ago for this. No. So you are coming in, you're downloading a white paper, that activity may indicate on the other end of that funnel to somebody, Hey, someone's interested in this topic or this service or this whatever that we do. But then as soon as you hit that drop down field that says you're from a marketing agency, hopefully they have a system in place that says, Oh, give this guy a negative a billion points. Yeah, because he is not someone that are safe. team needs to be talking to unless unless you're, you know, a marketer content lead at a marketing agency. Well, that is their is their target profile?

Nels Jensen: 10:09

Yeah, well, it'snot and frequently it's not. Yeah, it's frequently the drop down box does not include anything I could actually honestly click, you know, right. So yeah, so

Joey Strawn: 10:21

I have that other category, please fill in my,

Nels Jensen: 10:25

My self esteem is, is down right now I'm, I'm a negative, there you go.

Joey Strawn: 10:30

Yeah, right, you're negative a billion points, because there's like, I'm not selling my manufacturing to him. Right. But no, I mean, you bring up a very fascinating point is that every lead needs to be scored, but not every lead has a good score. And essentially, and honestly, look, if you're, if your universe if you're worldwide working in one of those manufacturing sectors where your universe is 11 companies in the entire planet, and you know, every single person in your entire sales, it sales database by name, then lead scoring may not be something that you guys need to invest a lot of time in. But when there are enough leads, that your sales team needs help prioritizing, which ones are going to close the fastest drive the largest revenue and have the highest opportunity threshold to close. Those are the types of circumstances where lead scoring becomes an incredibly vital element to any sort of pre engagement mix. Before that. We're marketing goes, Hey, sales, here are leads, there's one more step of saying, hey, sales here are good leads. Yeah. And that's where lead scoring comes in is to identify how good and at what level means good.

Nels Jensen: 11:47

So help me understand the difference between lead scoring and qualifying because at this point, still, we're still in the marketing phase, we're still engaging potential buyers with relevant campaigns, you know, we're trying to figure out that alignment so we can hand off something good to sales. So explain the difference between lead scoring and qualifying

Joey Strawn: 12:10

Okay, and here is where I have to do this now and I'm sorry to you as a glasses wearer and everybody listening but I have to push up my glasses and go, well, actually, the reason that there is a difference is an I want to be Lex iconically accurate here, if you will, is qualifying is a very unanimous term used in the sales cycle of a Salesman qualifying the level of lead qualifying the goodness of lead is is a very overarching term of a lead of having no known identifications to is this lead worth talking to, but in the sales process, and especially if people use Salesforce or other CRMs qualifying is usually an identified step within a sales funnel. lead scoring in our terms, and in this instance, usually takes place in that gray area between marketing and sales where that handoff is happening. And most of the time, it's driven primarily by marketing and oh there, but influenced heavily by what sales needs. And what I mean by that is marketing May, the marketing team is most likely the one in the HubSpot system or in the Pardot system or in the spreadsheet system, that is scoring the leads that are coming in from white paper downloads or contact form submissions or webinar entries or whatever it may be. And then that that team is then taking those leads, and identifying the scores, pulling out the cream of the crop and hopefully in some automated way. And I In an ideal situation, funneling the best of those leads with the highest scores at the right time to the sales team, who then further qualify them. So the qualifying is just an elongated process and lead scoring is a very specified part of it. Right? Got it. So that is a very long winded way of saying that they're very similar terms. But there is a very specific difference. And And honestly, I think is an important one, because lead scoring can be a very specific act that you're doing now. One, one caveat that I'll put on here is that lead scoring does require that you're monitoring and have some level of knowledge and data about what your contacts are doing. You know, it doesn't have to be the exact tools that we mentioned on this show now so you and I have probably proud off 20 or 30 different tools over this season. It doesn't have to be any of those. HubSpot is one that does this many marketing automation and tools will do it. But having some sort of analytics, tracking or monitoring system, so you know, when contacts come back to your assets, you know, when people are re engaging with content, it doesn't have to be on the page level of your site, it would ideally be, but it doesn't have to be, but making sure that you have some layer of technology involved to make sure that you can track who is coming to your site and what they're doing now, many times, and now, this is where you and I come into play a lot, an unknown contact will come to the site, and we have to get them to raise their hand and say, Hey, I am Joe Belle at company XYZ, and I'm downloading this white paper. And that's where we come in and make is making great stuff that people want to download. But once we know, you're those people, and once they've raised their hand, there needs to be a way to track them to make sure we see when they raise their hand again. And that's one important element Nell's that I want us to talk about before we move into kind of the specifics of the lead scoring is where like, what scores do you give people? What is like, what's a good score? What's a bad score? What do you need to include? Um, we've talked about, you know, the ones, the explicit ones, some of the the ones we'll get into in the second half, but some of the ideas of where along the marketing journey, are they engaging. So this is this is kind of talking about aligning our assets, aligning our scores, and aligning our strategies around the journey that we know our contexts are going to take. So, I mean, hypothetically, this is just me spitballing. I would say, if you have a very low engagement, asset, something that's way, way early on, sure, the very beginning of the market, almost write

Nels Jensen: 16:55

A blog post in a newsletter

Joey Strawn: 16:56

Blog post a social a social posts that you have, you know, on your Facebook page, you could score those, and you should, you should know when people are engaging with you, but maybe maybe they get one point for opening an email or engaging with a blog post. But let's also say that you have an asset on your site that's like, hey, fill out these 30 bits of very detailed information, to start a request for a quote on a project that we can service for you. That would ultimately I would think need to go above someone who, you know, read a blog post or like to Facebook post.

Nels Jensen: 17:35

Oh, yeah, you're Yeah, well, you're filling out 30 pieces, you know, I feel I feel like I feel like we're in Harry Potter. It's like 50 points, you know, I mean, it's like

Joey Strawn: 17:44

50 points to Griffin door. Honestly, if someone's going to fill out a form, I've seen some doozies of forms Nels, I know, you have to I know, like there's no way people are filling out 170 fields that you know, but no,

Nels Jensen: 17:59

But actually, at some point, you know, some of these engineered systems, you know that at some point, they're going to give over that information to get the system. So the more you provide, the higher the score can be. And, again, the answer your platters. Yeah. But to your point to the scoring system can be very simple, right? And maybe it's more points farther down in the funnel. And maybe it's something as simple as 123. And, you know, by after two actions, you know, you've got a range from zero to, you know, six points. So that already differentiates, you know, potentially a good lead from a NOC code lead. So it doesn't have to be a complex scoring system.

Joey Strawn: 18:41

Well, and that's, that's a man, it's like you read my mind, because the segue that I want to talk about before we actually go on the shop floor and give people specific things they need to think about is, we've talked about lead scores and numbers, and everybody's probably thinking, Oh, my goodness, there's a lot of math, I'm going to have to score so much. You don't necessarily have to and I want to I, you know, I want to spend a few minutes with you nails talking about what are the types of things we should be thinking about prioritizing, you know, again, we know, every company should be able to look down and say, Okay, if we talk to a Facility Manager, when they are in the mode of trying to refurbish their XYZ machines during a downtime, then we can close like 80%. Like, that's our, that's when we got them. That's when we can, that we can look back and say, Okay, well, every single person that came in that way, or that you've had that type of sale with has gone to your website, at least once they've called you, ironically. And at some point, you know, and it took about six months for it to happen. Like we know what touch points along the way mattered. And we know at what point once we got them what they asked. So the types of questions They're asking when they're in the consideration phase or decision maker raise.

Nels Jensen: 20:05

So or even to where you start Sorry to cut you up to where you started the show, where at the end of the year, there might be somebody who's got a little extra money on the books that they got to get off the books. So they're willing to buy a $30,000 machine in the next six weeks. So exactly what right so that persona alignment, you know, when that's not necessarily just some, you know, finance person out there that might be the plant manager who, you know, is it's, it's the time of year, can't can matter, right?

Joey Strawn: 20:37

You, depending on the system, you can score that you can say if a so and so job title, downloads this piece, after the month of October after the day of October 1 Every year, then give them an additional 50 points and like push them off. And that's kind of where I was going with this is, you know, not every company is going to have the exact same lead scoring parameters lead scoring scale, you could get some that have a one to 10 scale. And it's like anybody above a five who takes two actions and does anything, you know, we need to know. But you could have other companies who have like 100 point scale, 50 point scale, because so many interactions, or so many contact points and touch points are needed along the way.

Nels Jensen: 21:21

Well, but you you just raised a really good point. So you know, the salespeople often know these behaviors, right? So who does the lead scoring so this should be a collaborative process, among who just boom.

Joey Strawn: 21:36

I love that you brought that back. Because this goes back to what I was saying earlier is it needs to be run by the marketing team but influenced by sales is marketing should probably know let's use HubSpot as as a hypothetical if you're using HubSpot to build the lead scoring mechanisms, then the marketing team will most likely know those systems best and know how to trigger notifications to the right salesman based on the right scores. So they should probably be in the driver's seat on the technical stack. But the salesman will know man, every single person I talked to that I close has actually downloaded our 20 point, you know, field assessment guide, and they reference it in like 90% of my close sales calls, well, then you know that that is a huge driver of very good high intent, intentional leads. So score that one higher, it's all just making sure that you understand the points along the journey, and which you know, at what priority they are against each other. And that's what you need the salesman for is they're the ones you know, ideally taking these off of the floor and driving those conversations home. So they'll be the ones in the best positions to answer that the questions of what actions are all of the good leads taking? What questions are all of the good leads asking? And which things do all of the good leads seem to want to know? Do you right and your follow up on

Nels Jensen: 23:09

Your behavior commonalities? Absolutely.

Joey Strawn: 23:14

So I think that is honestly that's what we're going to talk about in our on the shop shop floor segment we're going to go into explicit scoring, implicit scoring and negative scoring and actually detail specific things that companies can map out for themselves and their current situations on getting this lead score process started Are you ready to head down to the shop floor?

Nels Jensen: 23:35

I am

Joey Strawn: 23:36

Alright, let's do it. But that that that shop floor music I don't know I don't we don't have a theme. If one of our listeners wants to make an on the shop floor theme for us. We'll we'll review it and probably use it so since then enter our website. Alright, here we are. We've talked about lead scoring, we've kind of had a fun very all over the place conversation Nels but I think I think we are ready to purely well what do I score? What should I even be thinking about? So I've said these terms a couple of times explicit scoring, implicit scoring and negative scoring. And I want to dive into what each of those are. And then I want you and I to spit ball a couple real world applicable things that companies can actually score. So explicit scoring, that is the stuff that you were talking about. Now, that's all demographic data, that is stuff that's probably not going to change unless someone like gets a raise or moves jobs or something of that nature. So explicit scoring would be we've used this one a lot else but I'll get the ball rolling with like job title, job title is one that that is just you know, you know that you're talking to a safety safety manager. And you know, you need to be talking to a safety manager. So that's a big deal. You give us an anyone with a safety manager or safety supervisor or whatever version have a higher score than, let's say, an HR representative or something. So what else like let's say industry, industry is a really good one. Let's say you know, you're a company, you only work with pharmaceutical industries. And someone comes in and says, Hey, I'm from agriculture. Down at the bottom of the list. Sorry, bro, we don't work with you.

Nels Jensen: 25:21

Yeah.

Joey Strawn: 25:23

Let's see company size or company revenue. Those could be great ones there, you know whether or not and I think we're going to have an episode coming up soon Nell's, on identifying your ideal client, and how to identify that ideal client profile and their size or their budget to their ranges. But those could very definitely be in that explicit scoring category of how big is the company? Well, we if you know, if a company is has over 500 people in it, we know that our services aren't gonna apply for them. So, you know, no way. Oh, Joe, geography. My goodness, what if you only work in Illinois? Then you don't want leads from Colorado? Most likely? So again, you know, there's a there's, uh, which state are you in? If they're not in a region of service that you offer, then that's probably not someone you want to offer. But if they are you work in Illinois, and they are an Illinois based firm, then a bunch of points right up to the top. Right.

Nels Jensen: 26:25

So this goes way beyond personas. Right? Certainly personas are more related to job titles. But certainly, industry is more important, you know, in in some instances than persona. Exactly. I mean, ever explicit for your explicit scoring. Right?

Joey Strawn: 26:44

Exactly. I mean, and this is going to vary by industry, this is why I'm not saying oh, you need to give job title 50 points, and you need to give industry 25 It's nothing like that it will be a Okay, well, the ideal person that we're going to talk to is the CFO, at a manufacturing company that works in pharmaceutical, you know, packaging. And so those would be the elements that you then prioritize in your scoring is like, Okay, well, you know, a CFO is going to get a higher score than an executive manager versus a director, and then someone in pharmaceuticals is going to get a higher score than someone in construction. And so, you know, ideally, the ones that are the cream of the crop will get those scores automatically and this explicit scoring, and so those can be identified quickly.

Nels Jensen: 27:40

And how does the win factor in with explicit scoring? What the What the when there's a what? Property based scoring, demographics, that kind of thing?

Joey Strawn: 27:52

Oh, and the wind? Yes. When we use it, sorry, I thought, you know, like, when like, when lost and went no, like a war, you're always gonna win. Again, these scores are great.

Nels Jensen: 28:01

Win a win win. Look, yeah, exactly. W H, E. N, when

Joey Strawn: 28:07

Well, the thing about explicit scoring is that there should be some layer of it all the time, it's going to matter, at some level for every salesperson that you talk to. So anyone who's like, well, I don't want to talk to anyone who's in human resources, or I don't want to talk to anyone who's in facilities, or whatever it may be. But explicit scoring is great to use when you know the exact persona targets. So, you know, again, if you have to talk to your sales team, if your group as a collective is like, well, we don't know, a job titles are most important. We've never, you know, we just don't know that. And you probably shouldn't focus too much on that, or you need to spend some time figuring it out, which is what I would recommend. But it's going to be used when you have a good understanding of what those target personas and what those ideal clients look like.

Nels Jensen: 29:03

Yeah, and I realize that the answer for most of these is always going to be it depends. But it's a good guy.

Joey Strawn: 29:10

We'll get some specific, we'll get some specific outlines there. I mean, speaking of specifics, that moves us into implicit scoring, which is kind of what we were talking about before analysis, that's behavior and action based. So implicit scoring is where this gets all sort of wonky, and it can get really granular and confusing for people. But I want to keep it high level. You know, implicit scoring are the actions and behaviors that people take that you think are relevant to their buying journey. So if people going to your website, doesn't matter, I don't know why it wouldn't. But if it doesn't matter, then you don't necessarily need to have a different score for every page on your website. If there are a couple pages that are very Important to the buying journey, then only score those pages. So again, this is going to be take with a grain of salt and make sure you're using and identifying the things that are important for your clients journey. And that's where partners like us, or people like us can help with that. But the things that we're talking about here are down like white paper downloads, Contact Form requests, RFQ submissions. You know, some people go as granular as social media interactions or email opens. I like to do email clicks. So if people are clicking and engaging on emails, give them some points. Where if they've gone to a webinar, have they done a a service visit, or an in person visit or scheduled a demo? Those are the types of behavior things that we definitely want to account for in implicit scoring, because and this sort of answers the when question, his behaviors will always be going on. Someone who is a CFO, might be a good lead, but not all the time. So that explicit scoring is going to be somewhat stagnant. You know, your CFO might be the person you need to talk with, but their behaviors will tell you when you need to talk with them. And when they're most likely in the market for for that communication. Right.

Nels Jensen: 31:23

So like on the content side, we're trying to align the right content and messaging with the right stage. Right, you know, exactly, you don't necessarily need to talk about ROI for something out of the gate with an engineer, but it sure helps with the finance department. So the converse exactly converse of this with lead scoring is, you know, you basically have are trying to align these actions where they are in the process

Joey Strawn: 31:51

In the process. And that's what's super, super important for everybody to remember. And again, this is why I'm not going to say, well, a website Visit gets one point in a webinar and gets 1000 points, because it may differ, you may have one well, you may do be great at webinars, and you have one webinar, that is what is hot press forging. And it's just a very general topic. And not everybody who goes to that one is going to be a sales lead. But you may also do another webinar, that is how hot press forging can make component parts for an aerospace oven. And then those people that went to that one would get away higher score than the people that went to the general information one. And so the score, the intent behind the piece, or the behavior is really what these scores come down to. And that's when you really want to think about implicit scoring is when the behavior and the intent indicate some sort of buying intent. So a website Visit may be great. It may be awesome that you say well, you know, people tend to come to our website a lot more often when they're about to contact us to buy from us. And so you you know, you have some general points for your weapons, but then there's a how to work with us page. And the only people that ever go to that page, are people thinking about working with us? Yeah, sure how to work with us page 10 points, right?

Nels Jensen: 33:24

There's there's not always a tipping point of when somebody goes from being a, you know, warm lead to a blazing hot lead, but you probably have an indication or, or an inkling of what some of those are.

Joey Strawn: 33:37

Well, and that's where you need to work with your sales team to find what that threshold is. Because there does need to be some and with the value of lead scoring is to be able to put a numerical threshold to that concept to say, Okay, well, when someone gets to 60 points out of 100 there warm enough where terian sales can close them, and being able to identify that based off like, Well, okay, how did they get to 60 points? Well, they're a CFO, and that gave them 20. And they went to one of our you know, very in depth webinars, which gave them 30. And then they came to our site and checked out two service pages, and then our how to work with this page seven days in a row. And that gave us an indication that hey, maybe Terry should reach out and say, hey, it seems like you may need us. And you can actually be prepared for that conversation. And that's where I think you know, some of this ongoing, that's where the implicit scoring really comes into play is when like, the timing of when someone's ready is oh, well, they just downloaded these couple. They're they're researching right now we can tell that the stuff that they're consuming is all research based, or we can tell that the stuff that they're consuming is all conversion and I'm going to give you money based. Those are the ones that we want to pump push up to sales cuz they're probably ready. And their score should indicate that.

Nels Jensen: 35:04

Right. And this actually, you know, mirrors in many ways what we talked about previously a previous episode, you know about Account Based Marketing and specifically, you know, account based experience. It's like, right, you don't sell to people. It's ineffective to try to sell to people when they're not ready to be sold to.

Joey Strawn: 35:21

Right. Oh, and I'm very happy that you mentioned Account Based Marketing, because this is also applicable there. I mean, think about that is oh, well, we one of our accounts that we desperately want to chase is company XYZ. So every contact who comes in that indicates there from company XYZ, a billion points, like, it totally aligns with whatever your strategy is, the scores can align in that context, and just understanding them and then putting them down. Now, we've talked about it a little bit. But the last element here is negative scoring. And this is one that I asked you and I asked us to put on this topic list for today, because this is something that I don't see enough companies doing or thinking about. And negative scoring doesn't need to be a negative, not a, you know, a qualification of that person's value in life, but their value in your sales funnel, because if they're a student, or if they're, you know, an HR representative, if they're from a company that you have no interest in working with, if they're a logistics company trying to get your business, then you do not need to waste your salesman's time, contacting them to find that out when it's already been indicated. So being able to have a system say, Hey, that's a student, negative 100 points, they're never going to be able to reach the threshold where sales thinks they're important, because we're just pushing them off into this bucket of, you're not who we need to talk to. That is an important element. Because one of the things that I see and that we see happen with lead scoring, and the conversation between marketing and sales, is marketing, like I sent you a bunch of leads and sales like No, you didn't. And the ideas there is we sent a bunch of leads and sales, like they sent me a bunch of crap. And I couldn't use any of them. So I didn't get any leads. So making sure the saying hey, I'm kicking out the ones that you don't want, because you've told me the ones that you don't want. And I'm kicking them out with my negative scoring is a very good practice to get into.

Nels Jensen: 37:27

So if you're going to score, why not do more of that? I mean, it's it's no harder than you're assigning scores to various other things. I mean, is this just a lack of, of education, a lack of awareness of the benefits of it? Or why do you think it's not as prevalent in is other lead scoring?

Joey Strawn: 37:46

I think sometimes it takes a backseat, because most of the time, you need some version of a tech stack to make it work, whether it's a Pardot, and Salesforce, whether it's a HubSpot, whether it's a Sugar CRM, or is 1000 other ones out there, whatever it may be, it's usually going to be a part of that type of system. And honestly, score lead scoring manually can be done if you have a closed market or a small universe of targets a small universe, right? Right. But most of the time, it's better done through an automation platform better done through technology, and some people just aren't ready to invest in that yet. So that would be one hurdle. The reality is most of these are so cheaper, you can't do it in a free trial of free version, that that's usually not as much of a hurdle as people fear. The others is just sitting down and mapping it out, getting started and doing it. One of the biggest benefits that I can that I've told people in the past is just try find five or six things I know these five or six things are good when my sales leads do them. So I'm going to give them points. And I know these my sales leads don't want to talk to these types of people. So I'm going to give them some negative scores, and then monitor which leads kind of come to the surface and ask sales, if those are the best ones, and then tweak it, monitor it and work together on hey, I want to make sure that you're always talking to the cream of the crop. What can we do together to make sure that you're closing the best deals? And I think it's just putting being able to put you know, some numerical help behind that.

Nels Jensen: 39:19

Yep.

Joey Strawn: 39:21

Oh, man. Now, this has been a fun one. I know I talked a lot. But I dig lead scoring. I think it's really, really fun to be able to back up and say, this is a good lead because of this, this, this, this and this and I can track it, and I can prove it. It's fun.

Nels Jensen: 39:35

Yeah, well, I can. I can tell you that there are people that I'm dealing with who must be doing negative scoring because there are a bunch of people I never hear from again. Exactly why now I know as the researcher and as a researcher. There's also some that I hear from every month no matter how hard I tried to get rid of them.

Joey Strawn: 39:55

I know there are 1000 times I know for a fact some are, and I know for a fact some art, it's it's a wild world, but I think there's a lot of value in it. And especially in one of our future episodes, when we're talking about putting together an ideal client profile, you can take a lot of those and turn up directly into these lead scores, because you're working with sales to say, this is the ideal client that we want to work with. And I say, well, I'll take that, and I'll give you let me find out how to wait to mathematically give you that. And that's such a fun, that's such a fun equation to put in front of sales, because it really does equal a lot of revenue for companies. And so I just, my big advice is just try just start somewhere and score good leads, and try and figure out what that range needs to be for the best leads that sales likes to talk to. And there's always some insightful stuff in that in that in that action.

Nels Jensen: 40:55

Yep. Yep. It's kind of like playing chess instead of checkers. It's just it's, like a little bit more dimensional. Because you're talking about profiles and behaviors.

Joey Strawn: 41:07

I agree. Well, this has been such a fun conversation now. So if anybody has anything to add, I hope that they're commenting on our posts. I hope that they're subscribing to the industrial marketer newsletter if you haven't already checked out industrial marketer.com What are you waiting for get over there. See the articles we've got a lot more content on there than we do in the podcast feed although we're gonna come at you every couple of weeks here with more and more episodes about how to get industrial business through marketing and sales alignment. I have always have a blast when we're talking so if you're not following us on social media if you're not subscribed to this show, come on guys give it it's the holiday season make Nelson eyes year by following subscribing and sharing it with all of your relatives whether they want you to or not at the holidays. So now any any parting words of wisdom before our next episode

Nels Jensen: 42:06

You know lead scoring just fast forward you to actionable insights

Joey Strawn: 42:12

I love it. And until next time, guys. We have been daily analysis and this has been the industrial Marketer Podcast. Thank you so much.