How To Use Lead Scoring To Get Insights Into Your Leads

The more leads you buy, the higher the impact of automation on your performance. But here’s the thing: on the one hand, you need to handle dozens, and potentially hundreds, of leads daily without manually checking them all; on the other hand, you cannot sacrifice quality.

The good news is that with Phonexa, you can establish a predictive lead scoring system that screens large volumes of inbound leads in real-time and automatically accepts qualified leads and rejects leads that don’t pass your qualification criteria.

Read on to learn more about predictive lead scoring and how you can use Phonexa to create a well-thought-out lead scoring system for your business, whether you sell leads, buy leads, or manage lead flows as an affiliate network or affiliate marketer.

I’ve seen AI through a multitude of tools we’ve been using, including for predicting outcomes and whether those outcomes are because we saw X, this user is more likely to do Y, or this cohort of people is more likely to do Y. I think that’s the stuff that will take some time, but you’re already seeing initial use cases for data analytics and predictive capabilities start to surface, where we don’t yet have a strong use case. But I think we’re starting to see that develop. Attribution gets stronger as a result of that, and then predicting outcomes become more methodical than I think they were in the past.” – Talar Malakian, during the Revolutionizing B2B Marketing podcast

Book a demo to learn more about Phonexa’s predictive leads scoring system.

How Important Is Lead Scoring for Marketing & Sales Automation?

Lead scoring is an absolute game-changer for companies that buy or sell leads in large quantities, enabling them to get a data-driven guess into the value of the lead in question and then distribute it in the best possible way. A robust lead scoring system is, in fact, a safety net that allows you to zero in on your best leads and protect your business from irrelevant and fraudulent leads.

• For lead buyers, predictive lead scoring ensures the leads they buy are purchase-worthy, including a numerical evaluation of each lead’s sales probability.
• For lead sellers, predictive lead scoring ensures they submit purchase-worthy leads to their advertisers or affiliate networks, protecting their reputation as a reliable lead source and allowing them to distribute leads to the highest-paying buyers.
• For affiliate networks, predictive lead scoring helps ensure a fair playing field, ensuring affiliates receive due payouts for their leads on time while advertisers acquire leads that match their expectations.

Having an overarching lead core for every lead in your pipeline is an effective way to stay on top of things without getting lost in the details.

What Specifically Does a Lead Scoring Model Score?

Depending on whether you’re buying or selling leads and the features of your campaign, you can put a few to a few dozen parameters in your lead scoring model and assign different weights to them. First, though, you have to develop an ICP to have benchmarks for your lead scoring system: product interest, location, age, gender, income level, etc.

Here’s an example of a simple lead scoring model for a mortgage loan originator:

For each criterion, you can assign different weights that reflect your marketing objectives and risk tolerance. If you are risk-averse, you might only want to accept fully verified leads with high credit scores. On the other hand, if you’re good at handling medium-intent leads, you might give more leeway to your lead processing system.

How Accurate Is a Lead Scoring Model?

Note that lead scoring is a probabilistic forecast, not a guarantee. It’s up to you to design a system that takes into account factors that reflect the sale probability fairly accurately, without forcing you to overspend on checks.

In practice, you need to think through your lead verification and validation, how much it will cost, and how accurate the results will be for your lead generation or acquisition campaign. For example, with Phonexa, you apply address verification, ID verification, email verification, phone verification, IP lookup, device fingerprinting, and a whole lot more checks to inbound leads, but it’s all about getting the right data without paying for excessive checks.

For example, for some campaigns, it might be worth simplifying things by using IP scoring at £0.0007 per check. The IP scoring feature calculates a comprehensive score based on 25 risk analysis data points, so you may not even need any other checks.

LMS Sync as Your Lead Scoring Backbone

With LMS Sync, you collect data on leads as they move through your system, including demographics, lead quality, and source-level data. Then, based on these insights, you can power your Ping Tree or Ping Post Calls 2.0 to reject, accept, and distribute leads according to their score.

If you’re a bigger publisher, you can manage your lead flows with Phonexa as well, ensuring you’re getting the most out of your traffic. But then again, as I’ve already mentioned, predictive lead scoring is a game-changer for buyers and affiliate networks.

Take a product tour to learn more about lead generation campaign insights you can unlock with LMS Sync.

Asynchronous vs. Synchronous Lead Screening

With Phonexa, in particular, our built-in lead verification module iClear within LMS Sync, you can choose between two different lead flows:

• Checking leads in real-time (synchronously) before the lead is acquired. Deciding on whether you want to purchase a specific lead based on the result of verification makes sense for high-risk campaigns, such as when you’re buying leads from new affiliates, traffic sources, or you want to minimise the risks of receiving irrelevant and low-quality leads.
• Checking leads in parallel (asynchronously) with lead acquisition. Competing lead verification and lead scoring in parallel with purchasing the lead gives you a time advantage in competitive markets, such as when you need to be faster than other buyers hunting for the same lead.

Important: With iClear, you choose the type of screenings, whether to run them synchronously or asynchronously, and the application frequency for specific campaigns. For example, you can randomly screen 50% of leads from source A, screen 80% of leads from source B, and screen all leads from specific locations or that match specific demographic or firmographic criteria.

LMS Sync & Data Collection for Real-Time and Post-Campaign Lead Scoring

The more data you collect, the more accurate your predictive lead scoring and analytics are, which, in turn, lead to better marketing and lead acquisition decisions. LMS Sync serves as a centralised data hub for your web lead campaigns and is coordinated with software for phone calls (Call Logic), email marketing (E-Delivery), and other products.

However, you may not want to go into details every time you log in to your software suite. To save time, you can pull the most essential metrics into the basic-level dashboard while leaving less representative parameters in the background, so you can access them when you need a publisher-level or lead-level analysis.

Here’s what the LMS Sync dashboard looks like:

In addition to numerical data, you can customise your dashboard to display your preferred charts and track the top publishers or buyers for the day. Naturally, affiliate networks have both publisher-level and advertiser-level data – the highest level of control over lead generation and acquisition campaigns – while lead sellers and buyers have access only to their side of the data.

Then, depending on whether you’re an affiliate network, affiliate, or advertiser, you can go deeper into metrics like, say, publisher data around the leads each of your publishers (traffic sources) posted, sold, as well as how many of these leads were rejected.

Here are the insights you can get into the performance of your traffic channels:

As you go further into details, you can see lead-level data, such as what leads were posted by what publisher, their first and last name, how many times this very lead was offered across different time periods (24 hours, week, month, etc.), and whether they were rejected or sold, and their price. With this information at hand, you optimise your offering, getting quality leads at the best price or selling leads that would otherwise be rejected.

Here is what lead-level data looks like within LMS Sync:

There are many more details available with LMS Sync, so there’s almost no limit to the flexibility of your lead generation and acquisition campaigns. For example, if you distribute leads to different buyers, you can optimise the process by building a custom ping tree that connects leads to the best buyers based on their bids and qualification criteria.

• Priority: The lead goes to the highest bidder.
• Weight: The lead goes to a campaign that was assigned the highest priority in the ping tree.
• Parallel pings (highest price): The lead is pinged to eligible buyers and is sold to the highest bidder.
• Parallel pings (all sold): The lead is pinged to eligible buyers and is sold to several buyers at the same time.
• Ping post: Some of the lead data is pinged to eligible buyers who compete for the lead, with the highest bidder getting the lead (the rest of the details so they can contact the lead).
• Even distribution: Leads are routed evenly to all eligible advertisers.

So if you’re managing the lead market, you can use lead scoring insights to optimise lead flows, generate the highest possible income for affiliates, and ensure advertisers only receive leads that meet their qualification criteria and price targets.

Example: If you work with different types of leads – exclusive, shared, and aged – as well as several buyers on the other end, you can match supply and demand as closely as possible so everyone involved gets the long end of the stick. For instance, you can send exclusive leads to the highest-paying advertisers, aged leads to buyers purchasing leads in bulk, and shared leads to a ping-post market.

Here’s what a lead distribution system builder looks like with LMS Sync:

As a publisher, you can access JavaScript lead-generation forms to speed up your lead-generation campaigns. The form can be customised to collect the user’s name, job title, loan amount, SSN, income source, monthly net income, and niche-specific details, such as whether they are in the military, how many months they have been employed, etc.

Omnichannel Marketing Coverage with LMS Sync and Call Logic

As a client with Phonexa, you don’t have to limit yourself to web lead campaigns only. On top of LMS Sync, our main lead management product, you also get access to Call Logic, which is essentially the LMS Sync for phone calls. As a result, you can manage both leads and calls from a single environment while taking full advantage of free data flows between these systems.

Call Logic comes with predictive modelling software, which is, in fact, a set of smart algorithms that can simulate lead acquisition campaigns based on your previous performance and the input variables. The best part of that is that you can run dozens and hundreds of simulations, testing all imaginable scenarios until you’ve found the perfect set of conditions. Then you can A/B test the best campaigns and run them in the real market with less risk.

 

Your Performance Marketing Platform for Managing Leads & Phone Calls

Whether you’re a lead generator, a brand, or you’re in the middle of the process as a performance marketer or an affiliate network, Phonexa can unlock otherwise unavailable insights into your best audiences, traffic sources, and campaigns while keeping it all in one place.

With our performance marketing platform that unifies call tracking and routing, lead tracking and distribution, compliance, and marketing analytics within one powerful ecosystem, you don’t have to switch between systems, juggle between reports, and jump through hoops – instead, you get it all in a single intuitive dashboard that makes sure you never lose the forest for the trees. You can go as deep as you need when you need it while keeping the focus on the bigger picture.

 

Here are the two core products you get at a single price:

Here are the six extra features you get for free as a client with Phonexa:

 

Take a product tour to experience Phonexa’s lead and phone call management ecosystem in action.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is lead scoring in marketing?

Lead scoring is a numerical representation of the quality of the lead in question. In other words, the lead score indicates how likely this lead is to convert into a paying customer, with 100 being extremely likely and 0 being very unlikely.

It’s worth remembering that lead score is a data-driven prediction of conversion probability, not a guarantee, so sometimes leads with lower scores may convert well, while leads with high scores may not convert into sales all the time.

How to calculate a lead score

There are plenty of ways to score leads, most of which boil down to assigning numerical values to various parameters of the lead, such as demographics, psychographics, firmographics, whether they are a new or recurring customer, and other details.

When developing a lead scoring system, you can assign higher or lower values to parameters depending on how indicative they are of a sale. Likewise, you can introduce parameters that mark leads as irrelevant (scored 0). For example, if you provide on-site services like solar panel installation, you may want to score all leads from mismatched locations as 0-score leads.

How accurate is lead scoring?

Lead scoring is fairly accurate for large-scale lead acquisition and lead generation campaigns. Naturally, the more leads you process, the more precise lead scoring is, and the higher the chance you can update your lead scoring system so it accurately reflects the goals of your campaign.