In the fifth and final blog of my HubSpot lead scoring series, I will be discussing what you need to know about updating lead scoring. My first two blogs covered positive scoring and negative scoring attributes, the third one discussed what you needed to know about scoring email drips, and the fourth one covered monitoring lead scoring. If you have made it this far, there’s a chance you have read all the previous blogs to this point. If not, there is no harm in going back now! In fact, I encourage it so you can be ready to tackle all areas of HubSpot lead scoring by the end of this post.

What You Need to Know About Updating Lead Scoring

As I covered in the monitoring lead scoring blog, lead scoring is rarely a one and done deal. We all know that things change over time; your business, offerings, ideal prospects, and goals can all change. Not to mention, changes can occur with your prospect’s goals, pain points, and content preferences.

Every time you post a new piece of content to the website, you’re changing your library, which means whenever you send an email, you’re changing your number of outreaches.

Aside from the changes, you need to evaluate your current lead scoring setup to see if it’s actually telling of whom your target prospects are. Your lead scoring framework could be qualifying people too quickly or too slowly. You can find signs that you need to make updates (both positive and negative) from any of these areas.

How Often to Refactor Lead Scoring? When Should You Pull Another Attribution Report? How to Add-in More Positive and Negative Attributes Based on Engagement

If you’re just starting with lead scoring, it can be tough to be patient with the results. While lead scoring can potentially qualify prospects overnight, that’s not always the case. You also need to consider:

• • Your current web traffic
  • Your current number of form submissions/downloads
  • Your current average number of qualified prospects per month

If you typically see a good deal of activity already and you have a solid understanding of what makes a prospect qualified, it’ll be relatively easy to determine if prospects from lead scoring are on par with past qualified prospects. You’ll also likely notice the effectiveness of lead scoring pretty early on (i.e., a sudden jump or drop in lead quality or form submissions). 

If you don’t typically see a good deal of activity or are just getting started, it’ll likely take you a bit longer to gauge the effectiveness of your lead scoring. You can do this by:

• • Trying to set a baseline for lead quality
  • Running lead scoring for a month or so and exploring the leads it produced
  • Comparing those to your baseline
  • Rinse and repeat

Until you have a solid grasp on what makes a lead qualified and can identify trends in lead generation (if you’re consistently seeing high or low lead quality from lead scoring over a few months), it’ll be difficult to draw definite conclusions from your efforts. There isn’t a magic duration of time, you just need to look into the leads you’re generating and how closely they fit your definition of a qualified lead. This step will go faster for some than it does for others.

Attributes are easy to update and can be edited (or removed) at any time

Updating Lead Scoring: Why It’s Important

Depending on your email and blog cadence, it generally makes sense to check up on your lead scoring every month. At this time, you can add in page views for new blogs, landing pages, or web pages, opens and clicks on new emails, and submissions on new forms.

You can also consider any attributes that you’ve learned tend to disqualify a prospect (like company size or location) and assign negative points to email domains of new competitors or members of your business network. You follow the same process in updating positive and negative attributes, and you can update the point values on existing attributes as needed.

This is the step where companies tend to fall off. It takes a decent amount of effort to get lead scoring off the ground, so it feels like it should be a set it and forget it kind of thing.

Just like digital ads, lead scoring should be optimized over time for the best results. Depending on new resources/goals, you can also update the lead scoring drip emails. Pulling a new attribution report every month is another healthy habit.

If you have a new highest-converting page, integrate it into your emails. As you see MoM changes in conversion on pages, you can update the page viewpoint values accordingly.

As long as lead scoring is providing value to you, it makes sense to set aside half an hour a month to maintain it. A lot of this depends on appropriately monitoring your lead scoring efforts, so make sure you’re familiar with those methods.

A monthly attribution report will help you update your lead scoring and give you an overall understanding of how your website influences conversion, something you want to be aware of whether or not you’re using lead scoring

Over time, you’ll learn more about your lead scoring and which attributes are most important. You’ll also add new resources to your website, send new emails, add new properties, and so on. If you want the best view of who your most engaged prospects are, you’ll need to update your lead scoring attributes regularly to include your new efforts and score activities proportionally to their conversion likelihood as you collect more data.

TALK WITH US TO GET STARTED

As you begin your own journey to set up a CRM and qualifying leads, you may find that you would like to speak with an expert to get you started.

Whether you’re just getting started with HubSpot or are looking to get the most out of your current setup, we would be happy to help. Contact us today so we can get started!