Scoring models: How to better predict buyer behavior

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Making an impact in the marketplace takes critical thought in the early stages of planning and strategizing. While using your data to improve upon your past performance is one of the most important steps in the process, it’s also imperative to be able to anticipate how leads and prospects will react to your marketing efforts.

In order to begin predicting which leads and prospects will react in what way, it’s essential to develop scoring models that will help you separate your strongest leads from the weaker ones and map out exactly what makes them most likely to buy.

Insights from the following questions can inform the development of a scoring model that attributes numerical scores to each action a lead takes based on your assessment of its potential to impact a future sale:

  • What content does a prospect find most relevant?
  • How might they have answered certain questions on specific forms?
  • What role do they play at their company?

Using Data to Score

You might observe, for example, that 60 percent of your recently closed leads visited the pricing page on your website, and 25 percent downloaded at least one of your case studies. Because of this, you’d assign a high number of points to those who visited pricing, and a not-quite-so high number to those who downloaded a case study. Conversely, you may notice that people who visited your careers page are (unsurprisingly) very unlikely to become customers: these people might get assigned negative points and be filtered out of the funnel so they never make it to your sales team.

Developing Your Scoring Model

Top of the funnel actions like visiting your homepage may receive a single point, while actions that typically take place further down the sales funnel, like downloading an in-depth white paper, viewing a case study or completing a form, might receive 10 points. Based on this scoring model, you can begin to determine which leads are most likely to buy and predict future sales weeks or even months in advance. With this created, you can monitor prospects’ behaviors and identify opportunities not just for further marketing outreach, but for the sales team to step in at the right time and help lead a particularly engaged prospect over the finish line.

You don’t have to be a data scientist to develop a lead scoring model, but enlisting one can certainly help. Consider working with a data consultant or analytics specialist, like the ones on our team at Movéo, when you’re ready to take your lead scoring beyond the basics. They’re the ones who can help you wrangle the many complex variables that typically come into play and improve the accuracy of your scoring models and the success of your campaign. Further, our experts will be able to identify strategies to tailor future marketing communications to reach prospects at all levels of the funnel, and know which assets are making an impact.

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