What is Lead Scoring?
Scoring is something sales people have done for years. They usually rank opportunities using a percentage based on the likelihood of closing a sale. e.g. 50%, 80% etc. They make these assumptions based on discussions with the prospect and on observed behaviour.
Insight from contact behaviour.
Through a prospect’s digital footprint, marketing can do exactly the same thing, interpreting the digital body language rather than the face-to-face body language which a marketing team generally has no access to. The end goal is the delivery of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) to the sales team.
Lead scoring is an objective way to rank prospects against each other. Over time this process provides insight into where they are in the buying process. Lead scoring tends to require constant refinement rather than a “set and forget” approach, because your engagement with prospects constantly evolves over time through your various campaigns and strategies.
The key measurement of success is the throughput of marketing qualified leads to the sales team and their conversion to sales qualified leads and finally to closed/won opportunities.
Oracle Marketing Cloud Eloqua Lead Scoring takes your predetermined set of criteria and imposes that criteria over your data, arriving at a score based on two areas:
- Profile data e.g. job category, industry classification, geography etc.
- Engagement data e.g opening of emails, clicking through to landing pages, duration of time of your website, specific pages viewed on your website, their engagement with campaigns and submission of forms etc.
Unlock the insight you need.
Combined, these two areas provide a level of insight that is otherwise unavailable. If you’ve used Google Analytics, you will have seen some excellent data.
The key difference here is that you now have an understanding of “who” has been on your website, and who is engaging with your campaigns.
What if someone comes to your website that is “unknown” to your Eloqua database? Glad you asked!
In the instance where you have someone engaging with your digital assets but is not registered as a Contact in Eloqua, their digital footprint is still captured using cookie technology.
If and when they disclose their identity through the completion of a form e.g. a white paper download which asks them for their First Name, Last Name and Email address, then their “unknown” status changes to “known” and their previous anonymous activity is married with their new Contact information. Nothing is lost!
Lead Scoring 101 Workshop
For most Modern Marketers, the delivery of Marketing Qualified Leads to the sales team is your primary business goal. Utilising the Eloqua Lead Scoring Model and business processes to help support that goal is a key activity for Eloqua customers.
Visit Marketing Cube College today to discover how our Customer Success team can help you build a model and execute it to help deliver the right leads to the sales team at the right time based on implicit and explicit behavioural data you collect over time.
