Country Lead Scoring Best Practices

[Jordan_Zabawa]

Hi all!

Does anyone have any lead scoring best practices for scoring the country demographic?

I work for a global company and we have recently implemented a global lead scoring program. The only demographics we are currently scoring are: annual revenue, job function, job role, industry, and product interest. Our lead score threshold is 80 and the highest amount of points given for a demographic category is +5.

We've seen a few leads MQL from countries we don't do business with currently and we have a list of countries we would like to lower scores for and would like suggestions on where to start. Should we negatively score? We are weary to negatively score Afghanistan for example, because its the first option in the country drop down list on all our forms. We've seen leads select that out of convenience instead of selecting their actual country.

Any input helps, thanks!

[Nicholas_Hajdin]

Hi Jordan,

Your lead scoring model is very dependent on who your business determines as quality leads. There is no "best practice" for scoring demographic data. Personally, I would refrain from scoring country as a demographic unless you value a subset of countries as high-value potential customers and emerging markets.

You may want to consider excluding the countries you do not want to do business with from your MQL smart campaign - that way scoring does not have any impact.

If you are noticing a large number of leads selecting inappropriate countries out of convenience, consider moving the countries where most of your customers are to the top of the available values, rather than offering in alphabetical order.

[Aslihan_Ayan_Ha]

When the prospect is not a good fit for your business, what is the value of keeping them in your database? Can the inferred data be utilize to ensure these are really coming from countries that you will not do business with and remove them from your database? Perhaps after sending an email for thanking them for their interest but informing that you don't serve in these countries.

[ChristinaZuniga]

Are you interacting digitally? If so, and you can't entirely trust a prospect's stated country field, use inferred country. If you dont do business in Afghanistan, set a filter for country = Afghanistan AND inferred country = Afghanistan. This will remove people in the US (or other countries) too lazy to scroll through the list.

[Anne_Angele1]

There is no set best practice for handling country, since your scoring model can vary wildly based on your business needs. I have done some scoring models with specific countries negatively scored if they are not a target demographic, so that's definitely an option.

For the Afghanistan issue, a couple of thoughts. 1. Have you considered placing your more common countries at the top of the list and the rest alphabetically afterward (e.g. United States, Canada, line break, Afghanistan, etc.)? 2. Can you set up a data normalization campaign to say if a form is filled out and the country selected = Afghanistan AND the inferred country is not blank AND the inferred country is not Afghanistan, change country to inferred country's value? If they are filling out a form, you probably have that data on them and while it's not perfect, it's more likely to be accurate than Afghanistan.

[Helen_Abramova1]

I would also suggest putting USA (if that is the most common case) in the top of the country drop down list. So people can quickly find what they need.