On-Demand SlideShare: Top 10 B2B Lead Scoring Mistakes A well-planned, well-designed, and optimized lead scoring schema can be a key contributor to sales productivity, sales engagement, and the rate at which raw inquiries convert to qualified leads, opportunities, and deals. In this slideshare, discover 10 of the most common lead scoring mistakes that B2B companies make. You'll learn: -Why it's critical to separate demographic and behavioral scoring -How to avoid "score inflation" -Common attributes & behaviors that are often scored incorrectly To receive monthly tips, strategies and information on upcoming events about demand generation, event marketing, and more, be sure to subscribe to The Point. Howard J. Sewell is president of Spear Marketing Group and a 25-year B2B marketing veteran. He writes on demand generation, lead management, social media, and B2B marketing for Spear's blog "The Point."

2. No separate scores for behavioral and demographic values.

3. Demographic scores are best thought of as how interested you
are in a prospect. Behavioral scores are how interested that
prospect is in you. If you only use one lead score value, there
will be no easy way to distinguish between, for example, the CEO
with little to no interest in your solution vs. the low-level end
user with a high interest. Scoring on both demographic and
behavioral attributes allows you to provide more meaningful
and relevant data to sales.
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4. Faulty inactivity campaigns.

5. Companies routinely use “inactivity” campaigns to subtract points
if, for example, a prospect takes no action for 3 months. However,
if a prospect so much as clicks on one email or visits one Web
page during that period, his/her score will never go down. A
better approach is to institute a score degradation scheme—
see #3.
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6. Score Inflation.

7. When you award points to a prospect for some specific
behavior (e.g. visiting a Web page, attending a Webinar), that
score shouldn’t last forever. The value of someone attending a
Webinar last week, for example, will be much less significant
say, a year from now. However, many lead scoring schemas
don’t reflect that degradation of score value over time, and the
result is “score inflation,” where individual prospects may ring
up lead scores of one thousand points or more, by which time
the score has become meaningless. One solution is to use a
system of expiration dates and deduct points over time.
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8. Multiple campaigns assigning lead scores.

9. There are usually two ways to assign lead scores. The first is to
build a lead scoring “step” into each individual campaign. The
problem with this approach arises when you want to refine your
lead scoring schema over time, in that any change will require that
you change scoring commands for every campaign in which that
particular scoring action is included. A better alternative is to
utilize one, centralized lead scoring workflow that applies to all
campaigns and assigns lead score whenever the appropriate
behaviors occur. This approach makes lead scoring more flexible
and optimizing the overall schema much less time-intensive.
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10. Scoring email opens.

11. Email opens are a grossly unreliable measure of email
effectiveness. An email “open” can mean many things, but more
than likely does NOT mean that the individual recipient
consciously opened and read your message. As such, scoring
email opens not only runs the risk of assigning lead value
for no valid reason, but can also contribute to score inflation
(see #3, above.) Better options are to score on email
click-throughs and form submissions.
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12. Scoring every Web page visit the same.

13. Web page activity is a useful measuring stick to gauge a
prospect’s interest in your company and solution, but not all Web
pages are created equal. Assigning the same value therefore, say:
one point per page, to every page on your Website, fails to
differentiate between high-value and low-value pages. Some
lower-value pages, “careers” for example, may even merit
negative scores, whereas more high-value pages, say: “pricing”
or “contact”, should be awarded relatively more points.
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14. Too little negative scoring.

15. Negative scores are a useful tool in avoiding false positives – that
is, assigning high lead scores to leads that in reality don’t merit
sales’ attention. Too many companies ignore negative scores
altogether, with the result being that junk leads slip through the
cracks and sales confidence suffers. Negative scores can be
demographic (e.g. consultant titles, companies below a certain
size, non-supported geos) or behavioral (e.g. inbound traffic from
consumer sites, visits to career page.)
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16. No scoring suppression rules.

17. In a similar vein, some leads simply shouldn’t be scored at all
since they’ll never be candidates for sales follow-up. Examples
of leads that fall into this category include students and
competitors. Rather than attempt to score down leads who
meet those criteria, it’s usually simpler to simply suppress
those leads from scoring altogether, and eliminate the possibility
that they somehow (through an intense bout of activity,
for example) get passed to sales in error.
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18. Over-scoring caused by repetitive actions.

19. A lead that clicks on the same email 5 times in one hour
shouldn’t be scored the same as someone who clicks on 5
separate emails over 5 months. Yet without the appropriate
score qualification rules, leads can be scored too highly based
on repetitive action. In the prior example, one solution would
be to implement a rule such that any lead can only be scored
for email clicks a maximum of once per hour.
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20. Scoring “contact sales” incorrectly.

21. Most B2B companies have a certain lead score threshold at which
prospects are deemed ready for sales. If an individual prospect
explicitly requests he/she be contacted by sales, companies often
assign that lead a point value equal to the sales-ready threshold,
say 100 points. However, this fails to distinguish between, for
example, a lead with 10 points who requests sales contact, and a
lead with 40 points who does the same. In theory, the 40 point
prospect is a more mature lead. A better solution, therefore, is
add a certain number of points (in this example: 100 points) rather
than bring the lead automatically to the sales-ready threshold.
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22. Spear Marketing Group is a full-service demand generation agency
that helps B2B technology companies generate, nurture, and
convert leads to revenue. Services include email marketing,
SEO/SEM, content syndication, lead nurturing, digital advertising,
social media, and content development. For more information,
visit us on the Web at www.spearmarketing.com
Additional resources:
White Paper: Top 10 B2B Email Marketing Mistakes
White Paper: Effective Lead Generation Offers for High-Technology Companies
Blog: The Point – Best Practices & Principles in B2B Demand Generation