Should you score leads vs customers differently?

[James_Zolinski]

Is it necessary to score lead activities differently from customers activities? We are starting to create scoring and some feel we need to score/identify customers activities differently than leads activities. If we do need to score differently, how would we score what a customer does vs what a lead does? Will we be able to identify customers vs leads? Is it necessary to score customers activities? I have noticed the majority of our customers activities entail logging in to their account, which I am not sure is a worth while activity to track since they are mostly paying bills.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi James,

i would probably ask the question differently: should I score the new business, up selling (selling more of the same product) and cross selling (selling product A to customers of product B) intentions differently. The answer is yes, knowing that up selling and cross selling are for customers, but cross selling and new business scoring are closer , while up selling behavior is quite different.

this being said, I also recommend not to make scoring too complex. You also have to factor in the position in the purchase cycle (bottom vs. Top of the funnel), the market segments, ... nd adding too many dimensions in the scoring makes it unreliable and finally inefficient, unless you can really move to a data driven (AI) based scoring in which the scoring engine will determine the relevant dimensions.

Greg

[James_Zolinski]

Thank you Gregoire,

Yes, we are definitely going to start off simple with our scoring. Is it possible to weed out existing customers from scoring in the bottom part of the funnel so they are not getting sent to our sales team as a SQL, when they already have an account with us? If I set up a filter of "Is Customer - False", would that help exclude existing customers being contacted as a SQL and only leave leads to be contacted by sales?

[Grégoire_Miche2 · Accepted solution]

It all depends on how the "is customer" field is set. If you are using the Marketo standard, if you do not "feed it" with a smart campaign, it's false by default for the whole database

If you are using SFDC as a CRM, the field account type might be a better choice, depending also on how it's set. You might also have other fields in you CRM that can give you that indication.

Another way it look at this would be to have a different lead management process, rather than a different scoring.

-Greg