Lead scoring is a necessary and important part of automation, yet it too often operates in the background or is hastily prepared during an implementation.

Lead scoring should be an active process where you continually evaluate scoring thresholds, new behaviors, and where the lead ultimately ends up: Win or Loss. Once you have your initial system in place, all that back testing becomes easy. So how do you begin to build a scoring system? How do you know what to score?

The Scoring System to Build Sales-Marketing Harmony

You could build it yourself which would be fast in the short run. You will hear from Sales about “unqualified leads.” Instead, work with sales to build a more scientific system to help them see only sales ready leads. You can do this in three ways:

• Option 1: Dictate: You and the Sales VP decide. It’s fast, authoritative, but limited. Definite questions from front line sales.
• Option 2: The Focus Group: You and the top sales and marketing people decide. Slower, but possibly flawed, requiring changes in the future.
• Option 3: The Survey: You survey the entire sales team and analyze the relative ranks of individual demographics and behaviors. Scientific, slower, fewer changes in the future.

I like Option 3 the best. You can use the first two for information, then build the survey.

Instead of basing your lead scores on what you think you know, just ask your sales team!

You should use their relative rankings, especially of behaviors, as a basis for the scores you put into Marketo. Once complete, you should back test scores against Won and Lost opportunity data if possible.

The survey is designed to elicit Sales’ relative ranking of individual demographics and behaviors to program into the lead scoring system. The idea behind the “likelihood to call ranking” is to discover how excited each sales person in your firm is to call an organization, title, department, function, etc.… based entirely on a single criteria.

I want to point out that you should include positive and negative demographics and behaviors because you will program both into Marketo. Some negative behaviors may not be as negative as you think for the Sales team. Sales will also rank both so you have a full spectrum from the worst leads to avoid to the best leads to pass on. If you want to achieve sales-marketing harmony, then listen to what Sales says.

Here’s my Lead Scoring Survey Template. [pdf] and when you’re ready, the Lead Scoring Planning Tool [xlsx]

Lead scoring in automation can only help you on a single criterion at a time. How you weight those actions or criteria determines the total lead score at any given time. Marketo’s >Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring can help you further.

P.S. Remember to sign up for the latest updates on the Marketing Rockstar’s Guide to Marketo newsletter. – Josh

Image: Flickr Drew Stephens

In preparing my first internal guide for Marketo, I started a set of checklists for our team to be sure we did not miss a step in running emails, newsletters, webinars, etc…

After working with other firms, I decided to update these checklists to be more generic while allowing you to adjust them for your business. Feel free to download them and use them at your firm.

Marketo Marketing Checklists [docx will download]

Marketing automation tools like Marketo can help you monitor your deliverability and list health over time. Of course, you may want to download all that data into a helpful Excel sheet.

Here is a sample report you can use to get started.

There’s much more email reputation management detail in the upcoming Marketing Rockstar’s Guide to Marketo, so stay tuned.

Need a global list of personal email address domains so you can filter them out of your lead flow?

Here you are: [xlsx] [csv]
(it’s nearly 1,000 domains, but use at your own discretion. I make no guarantees on this).

As a bonus, there are a few extras such as Spam Traps names.

Remember to do a few things with this list:

• Run a campaign to blacklist Spam Traps and to do so any time a lead is created. Spam trap emails are taking up space in your database as well as risking your email IP reputation. Use Black List = True in the Flow.

• Decide how to handle personal email domains.
  • Will you deduct from their Lead Score?
  • Will you hold these records until they meet other criteria?
  • Will you market to them differently?

Many people use personal domains when they aren’t sure about a company’s content quality. Or they don’t want to clutter their work inbox. Just because someone filled in their gmail.com address doesn’t mean they aren’t qualified. In fact, they may have filled in all the demographic detail you love. So be careful in how you score and handle these records.

• How will you handle *.edu emails? Or *.gov records?

If your company has services for these two verticals, then you’ll need to continue scoring and sorting by demographics. If you do not work with academia at all, you still might consider nurturing Students and Professors if it won’t impact your database count. Today’s students could be tomorrow’s buyers.

[update: 9/6/13: add me.com, mac.com, and outlook.com to this list!]

Happy demand generating!