Never Decay Your Behavior Score

[Anonymous]

I am very lost at times, when I look at scoring models. Maybe it's because i'm over thinknig it. I believe it's terrible to decay your 'behavior score' unless you are keeping track of overall behavior score as Lead score and behavior score serves as a recent indiactor score for you.

My Setup:

Behavior Score: Measures Lead's behavior for all time. No Decay.
Product Score: Measures activity from Lead within our product since it's a Sass based product, I can have metrics that feed data back into Marketo and score my lead's based on their activities in my product
Demographic Score: Measures my leads demographic qualities and then allocates them to a Letter based on a score. This is done through 5 contingent aspects (Industry, Num Employees, Revenue, Job title, Company Name - )
Recent Activity Score: Measures the recent activity that someone has taken through the website, This is almost exactly like Behavior score, but smaller scale score, more limited scoring and it Decays.

WHY?
I believe it's important to know when someone does certain activies and their activities history. I could login and use a product and download 9 whitepapers and do a lot in a span of a Month, then not do much with a website/service. This is very common at that. If I decay my behavior score, then I essentially might have a 0, yet I did a lot of  interactions with that service. So having a High Recent Activity and High Behavior score is a very good sign, but maybe I have a guy who came back after 4 months and is now interactiing with me, I could look at his history and go through it as a sales person and learn about him/her. But that isn't an instant indicator if I have a decayed behavior score. A always standing behavior score and a decayed recent activity would should he was active a lot awhile back and maybe now he has the ability to buy vs then.

I really want to get opinions on this setup and discuss some. I am very mathematical minded and logical and I believe to me. The way I set it up makes logical sense. Would their be another way/reason to decay your main activity score?


Very intersted to hear what people have to say. 4 Score is complicated ot maintain but the insight is great.

Thanks. 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for this. I'm trying to figure out how to recycle leads and revive leads without blanking behavior score to 0. This gave me a fair few ideas 🙂

[Anonymous]

Yes, I agree with both of you about pointing out the importance of the Sales Team.

At company X - Not sure if they would like me to mention their name. They have implemented a Quarter Review for this purpose. They simply don't show the Lead Score/Grade to the Sales team and ask them to work through the leads and act as if each one is high quality. Then like an engineering team would do. A post-mortem session to correlate their lead scores with the leads that turned into customers. Of course, the degree of variance here is the sales person/ability. 

But it was a very interesting approach and takes a large commitment between head of Mkt Operations and Sales Leaders. But the value can be amazing. Especially if the marketing team is spot on with their score 😉

[Matt_Stone2]

I would say it depends mostly on your scoring model and your sales cycle. If you work off a scoring model of 100 = qualified, and say a lead gets roughly 10 points per form submission, then you'd make your decay model set accordingly.

Likewise, if it's not uncommon for your sales cycle to take a long period of time, don't decay your score unless they go beyond the norm.

Overall, I like the setup you've proposed, but I also see value in maintaining a singular score that allows for negative scores as well as positive, from a simplicity standpoint. I could see reps getting confused easily if they have multiple scores they need to be looking at to determine who is hot and who is not.

It's very much a by-organization decision, but if what you proposed works for you, then that's awesome. That's just my two cents.

[Anonymous]

Ecavazos,

Intriguing setup. There is no right or wrong answer, and it's not black and white. I believe some decay is good, but at the same time, someone that exhibited a bunch of meaningful activities two years ago is still better than no activity, and lead scoring should reflect this.

Every organization is different, and lead scoring is a constantly iterative process. The best feedback would be from your sales team and proprietary data analysis, which I'd be curious to hear.

Hope this helps.

Charlie