Why Your Business Should Implement an Automated Ideal Customer Profile Scoring?

Since organizations have started investing more and more resources in content marketing, event marketing, and product-led growth strategies – they’ve started generating more and more inbound leads per month. So, getting inbound leads into an effective workflow have become critical for modern organizations.

Let's take a look at how companies handle inbound leads in the classic workflow.

Typical Inbound Leads Workflow

As a first step, all inbound leads go to the marketing automation tool like Hubspot, Marketo, or Pardot. Then if the lead becomes a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) based on insight from the lead scoring in the marketing automation tool – it will go directly to the CRM, where it will be assigned to one of the Sales Development Representatives (SDR).

Therefore, the first thing that SDR should do is manual research of Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for each lead. After that, SDR starts to work with the lead in sales engagement tools using high-touch, mid-touch, or low-touch engagement strategies.

If you have a similar process in your company, you might have faced some problems.

Problem #1

The first and the biggest one is that you probably could miss a lot of sales opportunities.

Because SDRs score leads with an ICP tag after MQL scoring – you could face a difficult situation.

Let’s say you have 3000 leads per month from different channels. And only 1000 from 3000 become MQLs. As a result, only 1000 leads could be reviewed by your SDR using manual ICP fit scoring. Also, you could have 2000 unscored leads each month. From our experience, 20% of these leads could have a high ICP fit. So, you could miss 400 perfect leads for your outreach or account-based marketing every month.

Problem #2

The second thing is that manual ICP scoring is very weak. Considering one SDR specialist could evaluate hundreds of companies per month, this is routine hard work.

To simplify this routine, they typically use not more than three parameters in their ICP score model. For example, it could be revenue, employee range, or location. An automated ICP scoring system can immediately score dozen of thousands of leads using a dozen parameters like website traffic, technology stack, funding, etc.

Problem #3

The third thing is that you can’t build an automated ICP in your marketing automation tool because tools like Hubspot, Pardot, or Marketo could provide the functionality to produce only the one lead scoring model. And these lead scoring models usually consist of two parts.

The first part is based on marketing behavior data. For example, you get 20 points for white paper download, 5 points for website visit, 24 points for the webinar, etc.
The second part could consist of firmographic data. For example, you can get 10 points for the correct location or employee range.

When you get 100 points – the lead becomes Marketing Qualified Lead or MQL.

Let’s say you have two leads. The first one got 80 points in marketing behavior but only 20 in firmographic. Probably it’s a very active small company that likes to read your blog and participate in webinars. The second one got only 20 points in marketing behavior but 80 points in firmographic. It could be a mature company that maybe download only one white paper.

As part of your lead scoring in the marketing automation tool, it will be equal MQLs who got 100 points in total. Alternatively, if we score these leads using the Ideal Customer Profile fit model. The first lead will have a low ICP fit. The second lead will have a high ICP fit. Based on our experience, 30% of MQLs could have low-fit ICP. And this is the main reason why your Marketing and SDRs could spend resources and time on bad leads.

So, a new approach is needed to add automated Ideal Customer Profile scoring in your workflow.

New Workflow

An Ideal Customer Profile is a description of the company – not the individual buyer or end-user – that’s a perfect fit for your solution.

ICP based on firmographic data are types of information that can categorize organizations, such as geographic area, employee range, type of organization, industry, technologies used, etc.

In the image above, you can see an updated workflow on how you can work with inbound leads. We added a new solution in this process. It’s an automated Ideal Customer Profile Scoring Platform.

When the lead goes to the marketing automation tool – it instantly will be scored by automated ICP fit scoring.

All incoming leads with high ICP fit scores before becoming MQLs or going to the CRM, where they are assigned to SDR/BDR specialists for high-touch outreach. From our experience, it could be 15%-20% of all inbound leads.

Medium ICP fit leads are waiting to become MQLs and then go directly to the CRM, where SDRs start working with them. It’s usually about half of all inbound leads.

What about a low ICP fit that becomes MQLs? They could go directly to the self-service. It’s 30% of leads. You can assign it to the manager, and then they only become Product Qualified Lead if they request a demo call.

Also, if we talk about automated ICP scoring – it’s not a complete replacement of manual ICP lead research. It’s the first and the quickest way of seeing your inbound lead. And the main idea of it is to reduce time-wasting on bad leads and provide deep manual ICP research only for good leads.

How to Try Automated ICP Scoring In Action?

Altum Analytics provides the most advanced automated ICP scoring platform on the market. It’s high-quality B2B data for your ICP model, which has AI that helps find your ICP, an easy-to-use ICP Scoring Builder, and also Powerful Reports. It integrates with Hubspot, Marketo, and Pardot. Altum Analytics is a native Salesforce application.

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Author

Dmitry Korzhik

CEO & Co-founder of Altum Analytics

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