Best practice to test Lead Score Model

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

I have just set up a basic/common lead score program (behavior and demographic) and before these kicks off, i want to test how the scoring works for leads vs converted leads vs converted leads with opportunities. My manager wants to see how they will perform with the scoring.

Not sure if its possible to do so without running a real-time campaign? Is there any best practice to test the lead score program? Or do i have to run a campaign but on a small scale audience?

Thanks heaps!

Amelia

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Amelia,

The relevance of scoring can only be measured under the light for your lead management process. In other terms, does the score correlate well with the acceptance of leads by sales, which materializes in the system by MQL->SAL and SAL->Opportunity changes.

The recommendation is to activate your scoring and let it start computing scores but keep you current rule for sending MQL leads to sales or inside sales. In other terms, you start computing scores, but you do not use it to fire lead assignment to the qualification team.

Just add 3 fields called "MQL Score-Behavior", "MQL Score-Demographic" and "MQL date" and a smart campaign that fires on "data value changes" trigger on the status field, new value being "MQL". In the flow, you add the 3 following flow steps :

• "change data value" on field "MQL Score-Behavior", new value is {{lead.behavior score}}
• "change data value" on field "MQL Score-Demographic", new value is {{lead.demographic score}}
• "change data value" on field "MQL Date", new value is {{system.date}}

In a couple of months (exact duration depending on you marketing and sales cycle duration), you will be able to examine the leads that have be moved to SAL and Opportunity stages and correlate the stats with the values in the 3 fields. If this looks good (SAL / oppy leads seeming to have a higher score; then it will be time to use the score as a trigger for deciding which lead should become MQL.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Greg,

Thanks so much! I'm embarrassed but I have to admit I'm barely a veteran user of Marketo. Please pardon me for the amateur question i'm going to ask.

I tried to look for the fields you mentioned, "MQL Score-Behavior", "MQL Score-Demographic" and "MQL date" but I don't see it in the smart campaign fields? Can you point me to this?

Just a background on how I'm segmenting the overall lead score; ultimately by Hot, Warm, Cold rating in Marketo. If it gets warm/hot, we probably have another round of qualifying (for warm ones), before passing it to the sales via email thus we will not be firing lead assignment automatically to the sales team just yet.

Thanks!

Amelia

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Amelia,

These are custom fields that you need to create, together with the smart campaigns to populate them.

Regarding the process, it really needs to be adapted to your business and you also might want to test various ways (send some to phone qualification immediately, while some other will go through your additional email round).

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Greg,

Got it! And yes, we will use various ways like you have mentioned as above. Btw, Is it possible to just test out the lead score on maybe just 10 leads first? Like via a smart campaign?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Amelia,

Everything is possible, but testing it widely is more likely to bring you enough data so that you can leverage it and validate or invalidate your scoring design.

It's always easy to reset the score later if you need so (use a "Change Data Value" flow step with a NULL value).

The key aspect during the testing phase it to avoid giving too much exposure on the scoring, so just avoid to display it in the CRM screens and do not use it for lead assignment.

-Greg

[Valerie_Whitin2]

Hi Amelia Low​,

If I understand correctly, you're asking more about how to actually test the functionalities of the trigger campaigns to make sure they are triggering correctly? If I'm right, I would suggest maybe creating a few internal test leads, maybe with a few people on your team. You could start by sending them an email and then have them click through the website and fill out forms to start getting scored. You'll want to make sure people take the actions that are actually being triggered off of.

Then once you are comfortable with that and are ready to launch there are probably lot of threads and reports available to help you measure the effectiveness of your scoring model. Like Grégoire Michel​ said above, you'll want to let your campaigns run for awhile before being able to truly measure the effectiveness of the scoring model.

Thanks,

Valerie

[Anonymous]

Thanks all. Once we have let it run for a while, how do we do the analysis? Struggling to pull the data together from the right places efficiently.

Thanks.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

You will have to extract the data related to all your SAL leads and run some stats in Excel.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Got it, thanks