Eloqua Blog · Lead Scoring

Eloqua Tactical: How To Create Your Own Eloqua Lead Scoring Model

A practical guide to building an Eloqua lead scoring model around profile fit, engagement, buyer journey signals and sales feedback.

📅 First published: Aug 14, 2020

⏱ Reading time: 12 minutes • 👤 Author: Greg Staunton • 🎯 Focus: Eloqua lead scoring, MQLs, profile fit, engagement, RPM

Note: Although this article focuses on Eloqua, the lead scoring thinking applies to any marketing automation platform.

I have been on Eloqua lead scoring engagements with more clients than I choose to remember. When I start these engagements, I ask marketing what they pass over to sales. The typical answer is anyone or anything that fills out a form on a website.

That means sales is confronted with a list of leads that are often just people who downloaded a whitepaper or signed up for a webinar. Lead scoring helps you pass those leads over with context so sales can prioritize follow up.

When marketing and sales get around the table, the conversation can get lively. That is exactly why the model needs to be shared, explicit and agreed.

What Is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is a shared formula and methodology for ranking leads by their propensity to buy against their suitability.

For Sales

Identify hot leads faster
Improve productivity by prioritizing leads
Improve forecasting
Improve sales effectiveness and pipeline

For Marketing

Measure marketing effectiveness and lead quality
Improve lead nurturing
Deliver more visible value to the business

Fun fact about Eloqua lead scoring

Companies that get lead scoring right have a 192% higher average lead qualification rate than those that do not.

Aberdeen Group, Lead Scoring and Prioritization

Common Lead Quality Complaints

Research into sales complaints about marketing leads highlights why a clear model matters. The problems are usually not mysterious: timeline, authority, agreed qualification criteria, genuine interest and role fit.

50.5%

No defined timeline to make a purchase decision

29.7%

Not decision maker

29.7%

No interest in product or service offered

22.8%

Not qualified against agreed criteria

22.8%

Not qualified based on opinion

Wrong title or role

Profile + Engagement = Lead Score

There are two sides to co-dynamic lead scoring in Eloqua: profile and engagement.

Profile Fit

Information a contact volunteers through forms, or that you can see from their business card or LinkedIn profile. This tells you whether you want to do business with this person or company.

Engagement

Behavior such as web visits, responsiveness to promotions and content consumption. This tells you whether the person may want to do business with you.

Lead Scoring And Lead Management

As you send campaigns, or contacts come to your website from social, search, ads or other channels, contacts consume collateral that signals where they are in the buyer journey. In return for that collateral, forms gather more profile information.

Lead scoring is fluid. Scores can increase when contacts engage and decay when they stop engaging. At some point, the right contacts reach the threshold to become marketing qualified leads and pass to sales through your CRM integration.

Profile Signals

Job function
Seniority
Company size
Industry
Current product

Engagement Signals

Number of page views
Number of downloads
Type of content consumed
Types of pages viewed
Recency of activity

Lead Scoring Matrix

Co-dynamic lead scoring in Eloqua combines a profile rating and an engagement rating. A lead might be A1, B4 or C3. The letter describes fit. The number describes buying-stage engagement.

Profile	Rating
Perfect	A
Good	B
Average	C
Poor	D

Engagement	Rating
Action	1
Desire	2
Interest	3
Awareness	4

Actions Based On Lead Score

Once you combine profile and engagement, each lead rating tells you what kind of lead you have and what action marketing or sales should take next.

Real Eloqua Lead Scoring Case Study

The first lead scoring model I designed and built as a marketing manager used three profile fields: solution, industry and company size. Sales helped place the available CRM options into A, B, C and D buckets.

For engagement scoring, marketing categorized collateral into a taxonomy and mapped content types to buyer journey stages using a content grid.

Updating Your Lead Scoring Model

Once the model is generating marketing qualified leads, you need a mechanism to refine it. The easiest way is to group sales statuses into a simple model and use the outcome data to improve profile and engagement scoring.

When contacts are rejected, inspect profile trends to understand why. When leads are recycled, inspect the collateral they consumed and use those patterns to tune engagement scoring.

MQL / SAL / SQL

Track qualification and acceptance through the sales process.

SRL / SRC

Use rejected and recycled leads to identify model weaknesses.

Revenue Performance Management

Once you can trap and detect rejected and recycled leads, you can tie the lead scoring model into a Revenue Performance Management model.

Measure fallout rates from MQL to SAL, SAL to SQL and then win/loss. If you can assign potential revenue using data such as company size, marketing can start using similar metrics to sales when judging campaign success.

Lead Scoring Tips

Lead Score Don'ts

Do not score on too many criteria
Do not score on open-text fields
Be wary of scoring on BANT questions

Common Pitfalls

Relying on BANT from lead forms
Asking for too much information
Not asking for information at the right time
Assuming bigger companies or job titles are always better

Multiple Eloqua Lead Scoring Models

When a single model is not enough, product-level models can make scoring more useful.

Read article

Eloqua Lead Nurturing Markie - Runner Up

A real-world nurture example where lead scoring helped connect campaign activity to sales pipeline.