What are your best practices for scoring inbound leads?

Below are 9 best practices for scoring leads

1. Build your scoring model with demographic and behavioral scoring.
2. Collaborate with your Product Marketing team to define the ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer persona. These will help with demographic scoring attributes such as company size (# of employees), revenue, vertical/Industry, job title, job level. Use data enrichment tools such as Clearbit, Zoominfo etc to populate this info wherever possible
3. Collaborate with your Campaigns team to define behavioral scores for triggers such as downloaded content, registered/attended webinar, visited website, multiple high-value pages visited in the same session (product page, pricing page), opened/clicked an email, requested a demo/pricing. Be sure to give conversions from students or job seekers (careers page visit) negative scores
4. Build the lead scoring matrix. This is typically a table with 16 cells. Low to high Behavior 0 - 100 points. Grade these as 1,2,3,4. Low to high ICP score 0 - 100 points. Grade these as A,B,C,D. Leads would then be graded into 16 buckets ranging from A1 (High ICP score and high behavior score) to D4 (low ICP. low behavior)
5. Collaborate with SDR/Sales teams to define the MQL threshold. You don't want to send premature leads over to SDRs/Sales. When you have alignment document it and train the SDR/Sales team on the model
6. Plan for ReMQL. Sales will want to send some leads back to marketing when MQLs aren't ready to buy
7. Test the lead scoring model before implementing
8. Track MQL to SQL conversion rates. Also, ask the SDR/Sales team for feedback.
9. Refine and optimize the model every 6 months

This question is very similar to a prior response I provided for the question: What information about the sales organization, products/services, and customer pain points do you need before you design an effective lead scoring system?

The logic here is the same. It’s critical to map out the various interactions you have with your customers and label them with a “score” based on desired actions. You can run through a similar exercise with PQAs and PQLs. The idea is to map out desired actions and score them based on the business priority.