B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine

If you’re not tracking visitor behavior, you’re not really scoring leads

October 16th, 2008 Posted by: Bill Gadless

We’ve blogged in the past about the importance of classifying leads into some sort of A//B/C scheme and nurturing the ones in the research phase, vs. simply shipping all the leads over to Sales;  and of being able to identify the occasional hot ones so as to get those to Sales a.s.a.p.  But how does a B2B marketer do this in practice, really?

The answer is lead scoring, which many marketers say they do.  Unfortunately, too many resort to shortcuts with it, such as…

• looking up and applying demographic information when creating the prospect’s CRM record.  While such data may be quite accurate, you’re really scoring the prospect’s importance to you, but not at all how interested the prospect is in you.
• using criteria such as BANT (budget/authority/need/timing).  Aside from the risk of this requiring a rather intrusive prospect “touch” at perhaps a very early stage, such “data” is notoriously unreliable (less than 30% of prospects provide valid answers to such questions, per MarketingSherpa).

So what should marketers be doing?  Well, we came across Jon Miller’s brief piece “Behavior key when scoring online leads” in BtoB’s Lead Generation Guide 2008.  (Btw, this is the second item we’ve spotlighted from this Guide, and there could well be more …a clue as to why you might pop over for a quick read).  Jon says the answer is to let your website do the heavy lifting, by tracking your visitors’ actual behavior …which ends up providing the most valid and relevant scoring information, with no intrusion risk.

From user tracking to lead scoring
Jon suggests setting a cookie for every visitor to your website …not just those already registered and in your CRM.  This enables you to look for identifiable patterns in their visit behavior, which are the nuts and bolts of a scoring system.  And by the time a prospect does finally register, you’ll have a pretty good idea of just how hot they are.

Consider two hypothetical visitors filling out your registration form…

#1 has never been to your site before, and found you today by clicking on your PPC ad offering a free white paper;

#2 found you 3 weeks ago and didn’t convert at the time;  but since then has been back 3 times, spent time reading your blog, and today reached your site by searching on your company name.

Even though their demographics may be similar, there’s no way you’d assign the same temperature to these two, in view of their behavioral history;  and it’s pretty clear which one may be ready for attention from Sales.

To create your scoring system, simply assign points to discrete visit activities and cumulate those over time for each named prospect.  Assign extra weight to such “buy signs” as searching for your company or brand name, returning frequently to your site or visiting your pricing page.  And – remembering that multiple people are typically involved in a B2B purchase – aggregate the scores of all the individual visitors from XYZ Company to get a handle on XYZ’s relative level of engagement with your company.

Check out Jon’s article for further suggestions on using the system and refining it over time… but the important thing is to get started.  What? …your website isn’t set up to do this sort of tracking?  Your Web marketing consultants will happily fix that for you.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy, Internet Marketing