Quick and easy guide to SaaS lead scoring

When deciding on a lead scoring model for your enterprise B2B SaaS software, base your scoring on the following points:

• The lever on which your pricing is based. For example, at VWO our pricing depends on the website traffic that you want to A/B test. So this becomes an important question for us to ask on any free-trial or ‘Request a Demo’ form, and the most important factor in our lead scoring model.
• How similar is the lead to the kind of users/businesses who normally buy your product? Here you’ll have rules like [+10 points because has ‘Director’ in title] AND [+20 because industry is ‘Ecommerce’] because these are the people who are buying your product.
• The number of people from the same company that have signed up for your free-trial. The more the better.

Most people in SaaS expect (and hope?) that their lead-scoring model will be super scientific and involve lots of data… and they scoff at the notion of marketing just walking up to the sales team and asking them what factors should they give “points to”.

So here’s the deal, if you have a LOT of sanitized and well maintained data, then your data-scientist delivered lead scoring model will be awesome. If you don’t, like every other SaaS in the world, then the data-scientist will come back and say they’ve found no real correlations.

In that case, it’s better to just ask your experienced sales colleagues for the factors they consider important, and run a quick analysis of your Google Analytics + marketing automation data to compare converters vs. non-converters on pages per session, time on site, new vs. returning visitors, number of forms filled, etc.

We did this and the resultant lead score was pretty damn correlated to them being an enterprise customer or not.

Again, lots of people might laugh at you, but those people have no context of the quality + quantity of data that’s required to build a real, ‘scientific’ lead scoring model.

P.S. — Did you notice that I left out factoring in-app activity in your lead scoring model? Well here’s where ‘context’ comes in. In-app activity is important when your SaaS is mostly self-service, and the majority of your MRR comes from customers adding their credit card details and paying monthly. These are usually apps focused on SMBs.

Enterprise SaaS doesn’t work that way yet. For us, the number of users in the company joining the product demo is a better indicator than their actions inside the app.

I originally posted this on my blog, but since Medium has more ‘brand value’ people seem to think that if it’s on Medium it’ll be of better quality. Also it ranked quicker on Google for obvious reasons.