What role does lead scoring play in your Demand Gen Strategy and what were the steps and considerations you took to set it up?

Lead scoring is an integral part of my demand gen strategy to help gauge intent and engagement. It should be used along with other programs, like 3rd party intent data, contact and account enrichment, and 1st party data from sales teams to determine when a lead is highly engaged and likely ready to speak to a salesperson about a solution or product.

The first step in setting up a lead scoring system is to determine the activities, actions, and demographics/firmographics that make up the scoring and the points associated with those activities. It is imperative that determining the activities, actions, and demographics/firmographics is a collaborative effort between marketing and sales, including any BDR teams, if they exist, and ideally should be based on historical data that indicates what successful activities/actions lead to opportunity creation. Once these have been established you should then determine a threshold to indicate sales readiness and an operational handover point where the lead is handed over to sales.

Lead scoring is critical for a demand gen strategy. Typically, lead scoring is exercised in larger enterprise-level organizations. Essentially, lead scoring helps drive alignment between sales and marketing teams and improves efficiency.

Lead scoring is usually set up cross-functionally with sales, marketing, marketing operations, and revenue operations, although this can vary depending on the organization. The standard steps and considerations are:

• Defining the ideal customer profile (ICP)
• Defining the lead scoring criteria (e.g., the value of downloading a whitepaper versus booking a demo)
• Defining the points and corresponding actions
• Setting scoring thresholds
• Integrating with your customer relationship management (CRM) tool