Just as engineers fine-tune their tools to ensure accuracy, marketers must adjust their lead scoring to minimize biases. Unchecked biases are like misalignments in a delicate apparatus, leading to inaccurate readings and misguided strategies. By diligently refining lead scoring, marketers can collect data-driven insights that reflect the true dynamics of customer interactions. This precision enables confident navigation of the complex B2B marketing landscape.
The Basics: Capturing Events/Touchpoints on a Digital Timeline
To map a buyer’s journey, businesses track every interaction, such as clicks, downloads, and website visits, using tools like marketing automation platforms and Google Analytics. These interactions, known as digital touches, include general engagement, like social media interactions. High-value activities, like downloading a whitepaper or attending a webinar are classified as events.
However, biases in event scoring can distort your understanding of customer engagement. Complete or skewed data can lead to poor decision-making, wasted resources, and misguided marketing strategies. Recognizing and addressing these biases ensures alignment with the actual customer journey, enabling effective marketing operations.
Identifying Bias in Lead Scoring
Common Sources of Bias
- Overemphasis on Digital Events:
Focusing solely on digital interactions often neglects offline touchpoints like trade show attendance or in-person meetings. This creates an incomplete picture of customer engagement. - Algorithm Preferences:
Many engagement platforms assign scores to events like email opens and website visits. These systems may prioritize certain activities and inaccurately reflect their importance in the customer journey. - Human Assumptions:
Teams may inadvertently reinforce biases by assigning higher scores to activities (ex: form fills) without validating their actual impact on conversion rates. - Data Discrepancies:
Variations in data, such as identifying the same individual as multiple campaign members, can lead to disjointed and inaccurate models of the buyer’s journey.
Fine-Tuning Event Scoring to Minimize Bias
The key ways to effectively limit bias in lead scoring are to use a more inclusive set of data points, regularly review and adjust scoring criteria, and make sure the scoring model aligns with the overall objectives of the marketing and sales departments.
Adopting a holistic approach to scoring requires a shift in perspective, particularly in terms of event frequencies. Traditional models often ignore more frequent, low-effort interactions like web clicks. To mitigate this bias, it’s beneficial to consider the relative frequencies of different events and balance the dominance of particular activities in the scoring model. This approach helps better represent a prospect’s engagement levels across various interactions.
You can further refine the scoring process by transitioning from quantifying events to analyzing ratios of success. By evaluating the frequency of different event types in successful buyer journeys, you can assign scores that more accurately reflect their likelihood of leading to a desired outcome. This shift towards ratio-based scoring aids in overcoming human biases inherent in traditional quantity-based models, guaranteeing a more comprehensive approach to event scoring in digital marketing.
Steps for Building a DIY Lead Scoring System
To make it more likely that your sales and marketing teams trust and adopt your DIY scoring system, you can optimize it to snuff out biases and make it more aligned to successful outcomes by taking these steps:
- Analyze Successful Buyer Journeys:
Start by reviewing 10 successful buyer journeys to identify what activities are typically involved in successful conversions. Look for patterns and metrics in these journeys, such as the number of web page visits or specific actions like attending webinars or demos. - Assign Relative Scores:
Based on the patterns you identify, assign relative scores to different activities; the more frequently an activity shows up in successful journeys, the higher the score it might warrant. Use your analysis to establish a scoring scale (e.g., 1 point for basic interactions, 100 for critical actions). - Align the Marketing and Sales Perspectives:
To make sure your scoring model meets marketing and sales needs, reflects organizational goals, and resonates with daily decision-making processes, seek both teams’ input on what constitutes a successful customer journey and the most meaningful outcomes. - Recalibrate and Adjust the Model:
Continuously reevaluate and refine your scoring model, anchoring adjustments and understanding key insights derived from successful buyer journeys. Guide the process with ongoing feedback from both sales and marketing teams, validating that the model evolves to mirror emerging patterns and insights.
Pro Tip: Keep It Simple
For DIY models, simplicity is key. However, if resources allow, segment the funnel and adjust the scoring criteria for each stage. For instance, prioritizing Marketing Qualified Accounts (MQAs) at one stage and contact creation at another allows for deeper insights into event contributions.
The Importance of Collaboration
B2B demands ongoing collaboration between marketing and sales teams. Like a well-oiled machine, this synergy can help create a meticulous and impartial scoring system, driving more accurate and actionable insights.
Need expert guidance to optimize your scoring system? We offer custom solutions that deliver deeper insights from your marketing funnel. Contact us today to see for yourself.
