Lead Scoring for Webinars: Identifying an Optimized Strategy

After running a webinar series, you may have gained hundreds or thousands of leads. Which leads do you interact with first? How might you best interact with a particular subset of leads? These are all questions that can be clarified by employing a lead scoring system in your marketing efforts. An effective lead scoring system allows you to identify, prioritize and segment contacts that may have a high potential for conversion.

We continually work with our Xtalks partners to actualize this fact — quality always prevails over quantity when considering the value of your contact list. Contacts who have somehow made their way onto your contact list but ultimately aren’t part of your target market don’t add value to your database. Some leads, however, could be considered high priority and may be ready to be contacted by your sales team. In order to prioritize and segment your existing contact list, you’ll need to implement a process that could lead you to make the right decisions at the right time.

Whether you already have a lead scoring system setup or are hoping to implement one, this post will help guide you through the whole process.

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is a methodology used to comprehend the level of interest that a lead has about your service or product. This methodology involves a rating scale and can be divided into explicit data like job title, organization name and location, or implicit data like email opens, webinars attended or poll question participation — more on this later.

Three Effective Steps to Establish a Lead Scoring System

There are three fundamental steps to establish an effective lead scoring system to help you optimize your marketing and sales processes.

1- Identify Marketing Qualified Lead (MQLs) Characteristics for your Lead Scoring System

A marketing qualified lead is a potential lead who meets the requirements to be a potential client based on your reporting and is not in the later stages of the buying cycle and is not interacting with your sales team. In order to identify these individuals, you need to implement strategies that can help you capture as much data as possible to provide enough information to lead score adequately. As we’ve hinted at, there are two types of information that can be used to evaluate MQLs in the lead scoring system: explicit and implicit data.

Explicit Data

Explicit data can be any type of information that is directly provided by the potential lead. These data can be items submitted in a webinar registration form, such as: job title, organization and country. Some of our webinar clients use additional fields to gather even more information. These can be fields like number of employees, industry, company partnerships, etc.

Through these registration forms, you can start to determine MQL needs and interests based on the lead score you assign to each category. Ask yourself, do these leads have needs that our company can fulfill? Have they already found a solution? Is the job title and organization relevant? These considerations are necessary to manage the lead scoring process successfully.

Implicit Data

Implicit data is derived from interactions your leads have with company touch points and these data aren’t directly input by the contacts themselves.

How many webpages have your contacts visited? Which ones? Have they visited or downloaded sales content? Have they watched a recorded webinar? Have they attended a live webinar? All these data points can help to determine your MQL as you develop your lead scoring system and are data points that aren’t directly inputted by the lead. Keep in mind that lead scoring is not only tracking which type of activity, but why, where and when these activities were completed.

These questions allow you to identify your highest lead scoring individuals and may help you to determine which individuals should be contacted first and which need to be further nurtured. Moreover, you can determine which stage of the marketing funnel your leads are in. Offering them the right content at the right stage may eventually lead them to the final stage of the marketing funnel.

2- Develop a Lead Scoring System

As you have identified the individual characteristics that define our MQLs, it is time to assign a numerical score to your leads based on each of its their characteristics. This is the foundation of the lead scoring system. Lead scoring may be accomplished through a number of different modalities and these are easily facilitated through a wide array of pre-existing solutions. All-in-one marketing automations platforms often incorporate a lead scoring function, as do third-party lead scoring programs that can integrate within your existing CRM.

Once you’ve decided on a technology to deploy your lead scoring system, you’ll need to establish a summation system that evaluates your lead’s qualities. The most common scale goes from 0 to 100, 100 being an ideal lead.

For instance, imagine that your potential lead is responsible for a large company who had visited three of your sales content pages and has downloaded sales-related content. They also meet your minimum job title qualifiers and have attended two webinars where they’ve asked three questions and participated in two poll questions. Each of these actions is an opportunity to add to a lead score.

You may develop rules within your lead scoring system so that a certain score is assigned to individuals who met all of these criteria or just a subset. Obviously, better leads who meet more of these characteristics should score higher than those who don’t.

When you host a webinar with Xtalks, we provide you with multiple different methods to gain explicit and implicit data for input into a lead scoring system. Our advanced webinar analytics report provides you with an organized table to identify the most promising prospects manually or through an upload to your CRM and lead scoring software.  Here’s what you’ll gain:

Customized webinar registration data:

Use fields like: job title, organization, date registered, questions asked pre-webinar and additional custom fields that may be relevant to your lead scoring process. For example: number of employees, have you used ____ in the last 6 months?

Live registrant information:

Review fields like: live attendance, time in session, questions asked by attendees, live polling responses, responses to exit survey questions like “Would you attend a follow-up event on this topic?”

Recorded webinar registration data:

Similar to customized registration, form data uses fields like: job title, organization, date registered, questions asked pre-webinar and additional custom fields that may be relevant to your lead scoring process.

Taken together, and when assigned a lead score, these insights help you better understand the individual characteristics of each registrant and help your marketing and sales team prioritize their leads.

3- Determine the Point of Handoff from a MQL to a Sales Qualified Lead (SQLs)

The third step in the lead scoring process requires deciding on a minimum score that MQLs transition to SQLs and identifying the stage in the buying process that your leads are best suited to interact with a sales person. It is important to have an open and ongoing conversation with your sales team to identify the key requirements of a successful sales prospect to optimize your conversion rate. Developing a service level agreement (SLA) between the marketing and sales department may be a prudent first step.

Finally, bear in mind that a good scoring system aims to prioritize and segment your MQLs and must be adaptable to constant change. It is crucial to check the scoring system regularly to ensure its validity.

Involving a lead scoring system throughout your marketing efforts can revolutionize your pipeline and serve as an efficient method to better identify, qualify and educate your audience. Webinars serve as a fantastic way to add a large number of data points to add to your lead scoring system, so we hope you get involved. If you’re interested in a more detailed discussion incorporating webinars into your lead scoring system, please be sure to contact us.