Using Lead Scoring to define Lifecycles ?

Marketing & Content Hub Lists, Lead Scoring & Workflows
1

Hello there :waving_hand:
I’m willing to use soon a lead scoring strategy.
And I wonder if I could then use it to define automaticaly my lifecycles.

My question is not (yet) how to do it, does it makes sense ?

I’m not sure cause :

  • I’ve heard downgrading leads from SQL to MQL isn’t a best practice, but if my leads can loose point, that might happen.
  • Also, I’m aware that I can lose chances to analyse the conversion rates from a lifecycle to another. But honestly we don’t really use for now…

Anyone here considered doing so ? or doing so ?

In case the info is usefull : we have a B2B SaaS.
Many thanks! :hugs:

2

I admire your ambition, but will say that any lead scoring strategy can be tough to implement. The potential issue I see with yours is that you almost need to have ranges to make it work and provide enough separation that people could not live in one stage vs. another. For instance, using the default Hubspot stages, if you have Customer as a stage and only customers can end up in that range, you almost need to consider adding a very large number to ensure the range of the customer is separate from that of your prospects and do not overlap (ie: clicking enough emails won’t make them a customer).

To your other point about moving from SQL --> MQL, I would agree with the sentiment that they shouldn’t move in that direction and would further debate whether SQL is even a valid stage in most businesses. While we would all like as marketers for someone to come in as a lead, convert to an mql, and further convert to an sql with an opportunity, in many cases the mql is just doing research or may be part of a team. In which case the flow becomes: Lead --> Qualified Lead --> Qualified Account --> Opportunity --> Won/Lost.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any one right answer to this solution and it’s really about making sure that whatever you do, that the handoff experience for the prospect moving from one stage to another is seamless and that the KPIs you need to report on are visible from the solution you implement.

3

Hi @EChampy , I looked at several lead scoring systems and therefore, I’ve seen a lot of interesting setups and stuff that is working and not working.

I’d highly recommend NOT linking your score to the Lifecycle-Stages directly. It makes it more complex and your system is not really adjustable in the future.

What I think you should do is:

Step 1: Line out your Lead Scoring and make it robust (let’s say you really know where you want to score points…)

Step 2: Create a custom contact property that has as many different stages as you wish (from “cold” to “hot”, or “low” to “top”, or just “1” to “5”). Call it “lead stage” for example. And then you can also create a “Highest reached lead stage” property. This tags every “top” lead that ever reached that stage, even if the score drops lower again. This way your conversion rates will not go away. Also you could stamp the date to a property if needed like “reached top lead stage date”.

Step 3: Create a workflow that is setting the new custom contact property to “low” if your score might be below 9, to “medium” if it’s between 10-15 and “top” if its between 16-20. These numbers are random, you set your own thresholds, but if you do it like that you will be able to have good solid scoring in place.

Step 4: Now you could do another workflow that is connecting you “Lead Stage” to your “Lifecycle-Phase”: So if it is a “top” now you could directly make it an MQL. This way your HS System is not producing as many errors and future workflows won’t interfere as much.

Advanced reasoning:

Scaling your system – the reason I’d do it like that is, that now you can go into any of the properties and workflows and adjust it way easier without breaking the system or start from scratch. Example: You want to add another “score” that rates the company of a lead (a tiering based on the jobtitle, position, industry, company size, etc.) and you want to integrate this to your qualification process. Now you would have to do EVERYTHING again or integrate this into your system which would completely blow up your workflow.

With the described way above, you’d only need to do the same steps again for the new company score, combine the metrics and you would be able to have something like:
Medium Lead Stage + Top Tier Company = MQL

Top Lead Stage + Medium Tier Company = MQL

Medium Lead Stage + Medium Tier Company = not qualified

…

By the way: I’d never use a workflow to qualify someone as an SQL. By definition an SQL doesn’t get qualified by a marketing workflow, but by an actual sales person that has done a demo or said that they are interested in your service in a sales call. This can have an impact on your reporting if you use SQL in a different way.

I hope this text helps and doesn’t make things more complicated. :laughing: By the way, if you want to chat about that feel free to send me a mail at dominik@dienerds.com – happy to help!

Best regards, Dom