Build a lead scoring system in Ontraport so you can focus your time and energy on hot leads – and make more sales.
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Home > Ontraport for sales teams > Lead management > Lead scoring
Home > Lead management > Lead scoring
Lead scoring
You'll learn:
- How to set up criteria for what counts as a qualified lead
- How to separate leads’ recent activity from old activity
- How to automate tasks based on lead scores
- How to delight your best leads with special offers
Rashelle Monet
Lead scoring
Build a lead scoring system in Ontraport so you can focus your time and energy on hot leads – and make more sales.
- How to set up criteria for what counts as a qualified lead
- How to separate leads’ recent activity from old activity
- How to automate tasks based on lead scores
- How to delight your best leads with special offers
Course Instructor
Rashelle Monet
Related resources
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Transcript
One of the biggest challenges in the sales process is figuring out which leads are actually worth pursuing. Sometimes it’s obvious because the lead will reach out and ask to chat with you. Love it when the easy ones jump out at you.
Other times, you’ll have leads who are initially radio silent but maybe show their interest in other ways.
Maybe they keep coming back to your website, or they read and click on every email you send. Or maybe they filled out a form, and what they told you in the form is exactly what you needed to know.
Sometimes your best leads can hide like needles in the haystack of your database.
Knowing who your most engaged prospects are allows your sales team to spend time on the phone with people truly interested in your business — and avoid chasing down dead-end leads. You're running a business — you don't have time for that.
So, you need a tool that will filter the good leads from the not-worth-your-time leads.
Lead scoring lets you set criteria for the “ideal” lead and assign points to your contacts if they meet it. For example, maybe your most qualified leads are people with executive-level job titles or those who work in the fitness industry.
In this video, I’ll show you how to build your own lead scoring system in a few easy steps. You’ll:
Let’s dive in!
To Set up your lead scoring rules, head to “Contacts,” “Settings” and “Lead Scoring.”
Add your first condition. Click the dropdown and — ta-da! — you’ll see where your lead scoring conditions live.
Ontraport uses scoring conditions that you create based on what leads do or what they tell you. You’ll assign point values hinging on that info, giving more points to leads whose actions tell you they're more likely to buy your product or service.
So what would you consider a good or qualified lead?
Let’s say you’re a veterinarian and, in your experience, dog owners tend to spend more money on treatments than other types of pet owners. Who knows, maybe the dog owners pamper their pets a little more than the cat owners? Or maybe dogs are more prone to accidents than cats? I don’t know.
Either way, it's valuable info for you to have when setting up your lead scoring system.
A condition you could use for this example is that a lead’s pet is a dog. So in that case, you’d add a “Field is this value” condition and set it to your custom field “Pet type” equals “Dog.”
Now you get to decide how many points this condition is worth.
But one thing to keep in mind is how this relates to the rest of your future conditions.
For example, do you want to award all leads with pets a point because they were interested enough to tell you what kind of pet they have?
If so, you’ll want to award dog owners more than one point because they seem to be more valuable leads than pet owners in general. You get to decide how much more valuable they are.
But really, keeping things simple is good. Let’s say dogs are worth three points. Click “Save” when you’re done.
Some other common types of lead scoring conditions include number of visits to a web page, clicks on an email, or clicks on a certain link. You get the idea.
In all these examples, you want to identify the really important pages or emails and award more points for those. Visits to things like your pricing and order pages are typically higher indicators of quality leads than, say, your home page. Someone who visits your pricing page is more likely closer to buying something from you than someone who simply happened upon your home page.
You can also assign negative points. This is a good idea when there are specific actions or qualities that you know make a bad lead, like people whose budgets are too small. I’m sure they’re perfectly nice people, but you’re looking to close deals with people who, you know, can actually pay you.
You’ll also want to assign negative points to people who’ve already bought your product.
If you don’t, then all your customers — who naturally are good fits for your business and may come around your site a lot — will be at the very top of your lead scoring list, which will hide your prospects. That’s not what you want — you want new leads only, not current customers. So, normally you’ll want to assign a big negative value to people who purchase a product, like -100 or -1000.
Moving on to this page, where you’ll see the Score degradation section. This feature helps you separate new activity from old activity.
Someone who visited 20 pages on your site yesterday is a wayyyy better lead than someone who did the same thing a year ago. So you need a way to remove points over time, and that’s what score degradation does.
Your score degradation setting will remove a percentage of a lead’s score based on a certain activity they take each day. It won’t degrade scores that are based on field values, because a dog owner is a dog owner, even a year from now. It only degrades actions, like page visits, email clicks and so on.
You can put any number here you like but starting off with one is a good place to begin. That means that an activity that happened 100 days ago is basically worthless to you, which is probably true, right?
Set your degradation percentage and hit “Save.”
Now let’s check your work.
When you save your lead scoring settings, Ontraport will start grading all your leads. If you have a big list, it may take some time, so be patient. Good things come to those who wait.
You can see your lead scores by clicking “Contacts,” and going to the “Score” column in your collection. You’ll see one number, and a percentage in parenthesis.
The number is your score and the percentage is actually the percentile, meaning that the lead is better than that percent of the rest of your list.
Now sort by score to see your top leads.
Now let’s talk about What to do with high scoring leads.
Simply assigning a score can be fun, and maybe you’ll find a few leads that were buried in your list that might be worth a call.
But where lead scoring really shines is when you start automating things based on your scores.
For example, you might send out special offers to your best leads. Or you might alert your sales team when a hot lead visits your pricing page but doesn’t buy your product. In either case, you can call up that lead with a “Hey, I noticed you were interested in our vet services and wanted to see if you have any questions!” type of message. Just make sure you don't come off as creepy or stalker-ish in your message.
Here’s how you’d set that up.
Go to “Automations” and click “New automation.” Create one from scratch.
Add a new trigger, setting it to “Visits this landing page.” Select your pricing page.
Then add a condition for “Field is this value” and select the score field. Choose “Greater Than or Equal To” for your condition and insert your threshold for a quality lead. Pick a number based on the scores you saw when you checked your work earlier.
I suggest scrolling down to contacts in the 90th percentile and checking their score. If you use that score as the threshold, you’ll get notifications when anyone in the top 10% of your leads visits your pricing page.
Next, you’re going to set a wait of 15 minutes. That’s plenty of time for someone to check out your page.
Under that, add a goal. The goal is that they buy your product, so add “Purchases Product” and select your product.
You’ll see that a side path has been added to the wait step. That’s where people will go if they visit your page, are in the top 10% of your lead list and then 15 minutes passes and they have not purchased your product.
If they do purchase your product, they’ll move down to the goal here!
So, over here on the left, add a “Send an SMS” element and select your “Hot Lead Notification” text. This will send you a text message for any leads who haven’t bought from you so that you can follow up with them.
Throw a couple end elements on your map, and you’re done!
Good work team — now you’re a lead scoring whiz and can leverage it for your own business!
As you create lead scoring systems in the future, you’ll probably have different approaches for each one.
When you do, ask yourself what an ideal lead looks like. How many points do you award for specific activities? How aggressively should you degrade points over time? And once you have identified quality leads, what do you do with them next?
If you’re all set with lead scoring and are ready to start sending hot leads to your sales team, check out our “Lead Router” video.
Other times, you’ll have leads who are initially radio silent but maybe show their interest in other ways.
Maybe they keep coming back to your website, or they read and click on every email you send. Or maybe they filled out a form, and what they told you in the form is exactly what you needed to know.
Sometimes your best leads can hide like needles in the haystack of your database.
Knowing who your most engaged prospects are allows your sales team to spend time on the phone with people truly interested in your business — and avoid chasing down dead-end leads. You're running a business — you don't have time for that.
So, you need a tool that will filter the good leads from the not-worth-your-time leads.
Lead scoring lets you set criteria for the “ideal” lead and assign points to your contacts if they meet it. For example, maybe your most qualified leads are people with executive-level job titles or those who work in the fitness industry.
In this video, I’ll show you how to build your own lead scoring system in a few easy steps. You’ll:
- Set up lead scoring rules,
- Set your lead score degradation percentage, and
- Create automations based on high scoring leads.
Let’s dive in!
To Set up your lead scoring rules, head to “Contacts,” “Settings” and “Lead Scoring.”
Add your first condition. Click the dropdown and — ta-da! — you’ll see where your lead scoring conditions live.
Ontraport uses scoring conditions that you create based on what leads do or what they tell you. You’ll assign point values hinging on that info, giving more points to leads whose actions tell you they're more likely to buy your product or service.
So what would you consider a good or qualified lead?
Let’s say you’re a veterinarian and, in your experience, dog owners tend to spend more money on treatments than other types of pet owners. Who knows, maybe the dog owners pamper their pets a little more than the cat owners? Or maybe dogs are more prone to accidents than cats? I don’t know.
Either way, it's valuable info for you to have when setting up your lead scoring system.
A condition you could use for this example is that a lead’s pet is a dog. So in that case, you’d add a “Field is this value” condition and set it to your custom field “Pet type” equals “Dog.”
Now you get to decide how many points this condition is worth.
But one thing to keep in mind is how this relates to the rest of your future conditions.
For example, do you want to award all leads with pets a point because they were interested enough to tell you what kind of pet they have?
If so, you’ll want to award dog owners more than one point because they seem to be more valuable leads than pet owners in general. You get to decide how much more valuable they are.
But really, keeping things simple is good. Let’s say dogs are worth three points. Click “Save” when you’re done.
Some other common types of lead scoring conditions include number of visits to a web page, clicks on an email, or clicks on a certain link. You get the idea.
In all these examples, you want to identify the really important pages or emails and award more points for those. Visits to things like your pricing and order pages are typically higher indicators of quality leads than, say, your home page. Someone who visits your pricing page is more likely closer to buying something from you than someone who simply happened upon your home page.
You can also assign negative points. This is a good idea when there are specific actions or qualities that you know make a bad lead, like people whose budgets are too small. I’m sure they’re perfectly nice people, but you’re looking to close deals with people who, you know, can actually pay you.
You’ll also want to assign negative points to people who’ve already bought your product.
If you don’t, then all your customers — who naturally are good fits for your business and may come around your site a lot — will be at the very top of your lead scoring list, which will hide your prospects. That’s not what you want — you want new leads only, not current customers. So, normally you’ll want to assign a big negative value to people who purchase a product, like -100 or -1000.
Moving on to this page, where you’ll see the Score degradation section. This feature helps you separate new activity from old activity.
Someone who visited 20 pages on your site yesterday is a wayyyy better lead than someone who did the same thing a year ago. So you need a way to remove points over time, and that’s what score degradation does.
Your score degradation setting will remove a percentage of a lead’s score based on a certain activity they take each day. It won’t degrade scores that are based on field values, because a dog owner is a dog owner, even a year from now. It only degrades actions, like page visits, email clicks and so on.
You can put any number here you like but starting off with one is a good place to begin. That means that an activity that happened 100 days ago is basically worthless to you, which is probably true, right?
Set your degradation percentage and hit “Save.”
Now let’s check your work.
When you save your lead scoring settings, Ontraport will start grading all your leads. If you have a big list, it may take some time, so be patient. Good things come to those who wait.
You can see your lead scores by clicking “Contacts,” and going to the “Score” column in your collection. You’ll see one number, and a percentage in parenthesis.
The number is your score and the percentage is actually the percentile, meaning that the lead is better than that percent of the rest of your list.
Now sort by score to see your top leads.
Now let’s talk about What to do with high scoring leads.
Simply assigning a score can be fun, and maybe you’ll find a few leads that were buried in your list that might be worth a call.
But where lead scoring really shines is when you start automating things based on your scores.
For example, you might send out special offers to your best leads. Or you might alert your sales team when a hot lead visits your pricing page but doesn’t buy your product. In either case, you can call up that lead with a “Hey, I noticed you were interested in our vet services and wanted to see if you have any questions!” type of message. Just make sure you don't come off as creepy or stalker-ish in your message.
Here’s how you’d set that up.
Go to “Automations” and click “New automation.” Create one from scratch.
Add a new trigger, setting it to “Visits this landing page.” Select your pricing page.
Then add a condition for “Field is this value” and select the score field. Choose “Greater Than or Equal To” for your condition and insert your threshold for a quality lead. Pick a number based on the scores you saw when you checked your work earlier.
I suggest scrolling down to contacts in the 90th percentile and checking their score. If you use that score as the threshold, you’ll get notifications when anyone in the top 10% of your leads visits your pricing page.
Next, you’re going to set a wait of 15 minutes. That’s plenty of time for someone to check out your page.
Under that, add a goal. The goal is that they buy your product, so add “Purchases Product” and select your product.
You’ll see that a side path has been added to the wait step. That’s where people will go if they visit your page, are in the top 10% of your lead list and then 15 minutes passes and they have not purchased your product.
If they do purchase your product, they’ll move down to the goal here!
So, over here on the left, add a “Send an SMS” element and select your “Hot Lead Notification” text. This will send you a text message for any leads who haven’t bought from you so that you can follow up with them.
Throw a couple end elements on your map, and you’re done!
Good work team — now you’re a lead scoring whiz and can leverage it for your own business!
As you create lead scoring systems in the future, you’ll probably have different approaches for each one.
When you do, ask yourself what an ideal lead looks like. How many points do you award for specific activities? How aggressively should you degrade points over time? And once you have identified quality leads, what do you do with them next?
If you’re all set with lead scoring and are ready to start sending hot leads to your sales team, check out our “Lead Router” video.
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