Digital Body Language and Lead Scoring – The Evolution of a Marketing Discipline

Most of today’s marketers realize that today’s buyer is a very different buyer than the buyer of a decade or two ago. Today’s buyers gather most, if not all, of the information they need in a buying process online.

Whether they are educating themselves on what is possible in a certain space, selecting vendor options for a specific business challenge, or validating which vendor is best for their business, buyers have access to a wide range of information options. Industry Web sites, vendor sites, blogs, social media and search all make the required information readily available.

The challenge this leaves for marketers is that they must observe the buyers’ online behavior – their digital body language – and use that to understand when a prospective buyer is ready to interact with sales. This is typically called lead scoring.

The art of lead scoring is evolving as marketers better understand today’s buyers. Originally, scoring models were borrowed from database marketing and mainly looked at demographics and firmographics. Is it the right level of executive? Are they in the right industry? Does the company have the right level of revenue? This information, although valuable, did not indicate anything about whether the buyer was ready to buy.

Marketers, realizing this, began to add activity metrics into their scoring algorithms. By observing whether a buyer was responding to marketing campaigns and showing significant Web activity, marketers were able to understand whether there was a buying interest as well as the individual being the right buyer.

Merging these two aspects of scoring, however, led to an interesting challenge. If you had a 100 point scoring range with 50 points for the “who” (right executive) and 50 points for “how interested” (web activity showing buying interest), it would be difficult to tell an uninterested executive from a keenly interested intern.

Because of this, today’s marketers mostly split lead scoring into two dimensions. One dimension scores the “who” and one dimension scores the “how interested.” From there, leads are categorized as A, B, C on the “who” and 1, 2, 3 on the “how interested.” A1 leads are immediately passed to sales, while A3 leads (right executive, not showing buying interest) are nurtured and C1 leads (not the right person, but very interested) are engaged as influencers to gain access to the right executives.

This two-dimensional scoring is extremely powerful, and leads to significant revenue benefits as only sales-ready leads are passed to sales. This allows sales to focus on active opportunities while marketing nurtures earlier stage buyers who are not yet ready to buy.

The focus on nurturing the leads that are not yet sales ready, however, is leading to another evolution in how marketing thinks about buyers. Prior to being sales ready, buyers go through a series of stages – unique to each business – that may involve awareness, education, sampling or comparison. Some of today’s most innovative marketers have begun using the same lead scoring approaches that were used to determine when a lead is sales ready to determine what stage of his or her buying process each lead is at.

By mapping the insights gained from looking at a buyer’s digital body language to each phase, it is possible to determine whether a buyer is looking for general education on the industry, is determining the list of potential vendors that may be able to solve his or her business challenge, or is validating whether your solution will be the best option.

Scoring against this and determining each buyer’s phase in their buying cycle allows you as a marketer to map your messaging to exactly what that buyer is seeking, which makes your messaging significantly more effective.

Today’s buyers are very different than the buyers of 10 years ago, in that they have easy access to all the information they require in their buying process. Because of this, today’s marketers must work to understand each buyer’s digital body language and use that to guide each interaction. Lead scoring is the discipline that allows us to do this, and it continues to evolve to give marketers more insight into their buying audience.

As the lead scoring evolution continues, marketers can now determine the exact phase of the buying process each buyer is in – and digital body language plays a critical role in this process.

Steve Woods is cofounder and CTO of Eloqua, a provider of marketing automation technology.