Multiple Scoring Rule

Multiple Scoring Rule

What are scoring rules?

Scoring rules help qualify prospects based on various parameters such as their behavior, demography, or other key details of their persona. The higher the score, the more likely the prospect is to become a customer. Scoring helps companies improve their marketing outreach by focusing their efforts on the customers who have the highest conversion potential.


Why do we need multiple scoring rules?

Lead scoring models will vary from one business to another. For example, a clothing retailer might benefit by scoring customers by geography (e.g., customers in colder places will buy more winter clothing) and demography (e.g., the younger generation is more likely to purchase the latest fashions). An insurance company will use demographic data such as sex, age, and marital status to determine which types of insurance their customers are likely to buy (e.g. married customers might be more interested in life insurance). 

Another important criteria that can give companies a deeper insight into their prospects is behavioral data. Details such as how frequently customers open your emails, when their last purchase was, how many of your webinars they attend, how receptive they are to the phone calls, and how much they negotiate before signing a contract directly relate to a customer's interests and can be a key factor in helping businesses outline a better marketing strategy. 

Depending on business model, customer base, product line, or marketing strategy the lead scoring methodology can vary from business to business and from one department to another. For example:
  1. Some businesses may require each team to use their own separate criteria to qualify a contact to get a better overall understanding of their behavior. 
  2. Some businesses may want to score their lead separately for every product they show interest in, so they can align their marketing outreach according to the lead's interest at every stage in the sales process. 

Benefits of multiple scoring rules

Multiple scoring rules allow sales, marketing, support, and other teams to evaluate a customer individually based on parameters that make sense for their process. This gives them a better understanding of the customer's overall behavior at every touchpoint.

A prospect can be ranked on different attributes by each team:

I. The Sales team will use lead scoring to identify interested leads:
  1. 6 points for opening an email
  2. 8 points for answering a phone call
  3. 10 points for Twitter mentions
  4. 10 points for responding to an email
II. The Marketing team will score the leads based on their interest, behavior, and responsiveness:
  1. 5 points for showing interest for a webinar
  2. 6 points for registering for the webinar
  3. 10 points for clicking on a promotion
  4. - 6 points for not responding to email follow-ups
  5. 10 points for downloading an ebook
III. The Support team will score the lead based on the type of issue, priority, industry, proposed solution, and feedback:
  1. 8 points for deleted data
  2. 7 points for being in the IT industry, 4 points for being in the Manufacturing industry (this can be determined by analyzing previous tickets)
  3. 9 points for showstopper issues
  4. 5 points for positive feedback
This scoring method gives every team an opportunity to evaluate the customers over different touchpoints and understand how they are moving through the process that team handles. Over time, these analytics will help CRM users identify the hot leads and pursue them quicker, align marketing strategies to better segment and target customers, increase sales by reaching out to seasonal customers at the right time, and provide more effective and dedicated support to premium customers.

Availability
Permission Required
Users with Manage Automation permission in their profile can access this feature.

Business scenarios

Scoring in a B2B business model

In a B2B model, the decision to make a purchase is rarely made by just one individual. There often are multiple decision makers at different levels in the customer organization who decide whether to buy, negotiate, or decline your offer. The sales cycle in B2B business models is long, so it is important that every customer touchpoint is ranked to help you identify the deals with the highest conversion potential and move them quickly down the funnel.

The sales and customer success teams must evaluate prospects on different parameters to find how likely they are to become customers. Here's some examples of how prospects might be scored in B2B situations:

Lead scoring: The sales team scores leads based on how well they respond at each touchpoint.
  1. 3 points for opening an email
  2. 5 points for registering for a webinar
  3. 5 points for Twitter mentions
  4. 5 for not responding after 5 email follow-ups
  5. 10 points for attending a training
Account scoring: The industry the customer organization belongs to, their purchase quantity, company location, annual turnover, and quarterly growth are important qualifying criteria in a B2B model.

For example, a textile manufacturer can channel marketing funds in the right direction by identifying the best deals using this scoring model:
  1. 10 points for working in the clothing industry
  2. 5 points for working in the shoes and accessories industry
  3. 10 points for being an international brand
  4. 8 points for making a bulk purchase of raw material every month
  5. 6 points for an annual turnover of more than US$100 million
Contact scoring: When multiple decision makers are involved, who your point of contact is can become a deciding factor in winning a deal.

For example, if you are directly in contact with the Vice President of Sales, you're in a better position to close the deal quickly than if you're just working with a Sales Manager. Your contacts can be scored based on their role in their organization:
  1. 10 point for Vice President
  2. 5 points for Manager
  3. 3 points for Analyst

Scoring in multi-product and cross selling businesses

Sales outreach and customer behavior often varies from product to product, for example a customer may purchase a laptop soon after adding it to their cart, but take a few weeks to decide whether to buy an air conditioner. 

Now, scoring the lead based only on laptop purchase will not give the sales reps an accurate insight into their behavior, and may cause them to use unsuccessful engagement strategies.

The customer's behavior will depend on many factors and your team should be equipped to modify their interactions accordingly and score the lead based on each product to get the real picture. 

The same applies to cross-selling. The sales team must evaluate their prospects based on their customer profiles and the products they have shown interest in to determine whether they are likely to buy the suggested cross-sell product. Here is a recommended scoring pattern:

Contact scoring: For repeat purchases, the customer is already known to the sales team, which gives them better leverage and more accurate customer profiling. This will help them to customize their marketing strategy accordingly.
  1. 10 points for high value frequent purchases
  2. 6 points for high value infrequent purchases
  3. 8 points for low value frequent purchases
  4. 3 points for low value infrequent purchases
Account scoring: Customers' product preference and interest will be different in B2B and B2C business models. For example, bulk purchases are more likely in B2B than B2C.
Similarly, in a B2B model, customers from a specific industry will have more interest in some products than customers from other industries. For example, an IT company will be more interested in purchasing computers, software, and hardware compared to a furnishing company. 
  1. 8 points for B2B
  2. 5 points for B2C
  3. 9 points if the industry type is IT
  4. 2 points if the industry type is Furnishing

Scoring for multiple customer touchpoints

Businesses rely on a variety of marketing campaigns to engage with their customers including, email campaigns, webinars, surveys, conferences, meet-ups, training sessions, and more. How a customer interacts with you at each of these touchpoints eventually helps you determine whether they are likely to do business with you or not. Some customers may be responsive to email campaigns and always register for and attend webinars but not show interest in attending training. 

Scoring customers separately for each touchpoint gives you a more detailed insight into their interests and helps the sales team decide the best engagement strategy. You can use email insights and other statistics from integration tools like Zoho Webinar, Backstage, and Survey to assess your customers' responsiveness across multiple touchpoints. Here's an example of how you might score each touchpoint:
  1. 10 points for clicking on a promotion
  2. 5 points for opening an email
  3. - 10 for not attending a webinar
  4. 10 points for downloading an ebook
  5. 5 points for attending conference
  6. - 10 for not responding to follow-up emails

Configuring multiple scoring rules

You can configure scoring rules for Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Deals, and Custom Modules. The rules are layout based and each layout can have up to five rules.

For example, if the Leads module is divided into regional layouts like North America, South America, and Middle East, then each layout can have up to five rules, that is, each of the regional layouts has rules for sales, marketing, and support.

Configuring scoring rule requires the following steps:
  1. Name the rule.
  2. Choose the module you want to create the rule for.
  3. Select the layout the rule will apply to. You can also choose to apply the rule to all the layouts in the module. 
  4. Set criteria to add or subtract points. For example, a contact who is referred by one of your reliable customers can be given additional points. 
  5. Select the touchpoints and give scores for every interaction. The following fields will be displayed:
    1. Email insights: opened, clicked, and bounced
      Emails sent from CRM are considered. 
    2. Survey: responded and visited.
    3. Backstage: purchase, check-in, and cancellation
    4. Webinar: registration
    5. Campaigns: emails opened, clicked, and bounced.
      This only considers emails sent from Zoho Campaigns.
Note
  1. Fields from other Zoho services (Backstage, Survey, Webinar, Social, and Campaigns, Desk), Telephony, Mailchimp will be displayed only if the CRM account is integrated with these applications. For example, you can set scoring rules based on Calls only if the Telephony integration is enabled. Similarly, you can set scoring rules for Facebook or Twitter only if Social integration is enabled. 
  2. While setting up a new scoring rule, you can choose if the new configuration must apply to the older records as well. 
  3. The touchpoint scores can be configured only for the leads and contacts modules, where interaction with prospects is possible.
  4. For accounts, deals, and custom modules (including people-based modules), you cannot configure scores for touchpoints. 
To configure multiple scoring rules
  1. Go to Setup > Automation > Scoring Rule.
  2. Click New Scoring Rule.
  3. In Create Scoring Rules page, enter the Rule name.
  4. Select a module for which the rule is been created.
  5. Choose a Layout from the drop-down list.
  6. Enter description if needed.
  7. Click Next.
  8. Click Add Criteria and select the field and value.
    This is an optional step.
  9. Check Add or Subtract and enter the points.
  10. Click Done.
  11. Select the applications from the list of available integrations (eg., email insights, webinar etc.).
  12. Check the required fields, select either Add or Subtract, and enter the score points.
  13. Click Save.
  14. In the Update Old Record popup, choose either  update old records or continue without updating.
    Only those records that were created or modified in the past 6 months will be updated.

Viewing scores of Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Deals, and Custom Modules

Scores for every record can be viewed on the record's detail page. The scores are categorized as:
  1. Positive Score 
  2. Negative Score
  3. Positive Touchpoint Score - The total positive scores obtained from all the touchpoints.
  4. Negative Touchpoint Score - The total negative scores obtained from all the touchpoints.
  5. Total Touchpoints score - The difference of positive and negative touchpoint scores. 
  6. Total score - Sum of the overall score.
If the score cannot be computed, it will be shown as zero. 
The positive, negative, and total touchpoint scores can be viewed only in the records of the people-based modules like  Leads and  Contacts. 


A graphical representation of the scoring.


However, the touchpoint scores will not be displayed for Accounts, Deals, and  Custom Modules (including people-based custom modules) because records in these modules are information about the leads or contacts.

A graphical representation of the scoring.

Filter and search for a rule

Enter the name of a rule in the search bar on the Scoring Rule list view to look up a particular rule. You can also filter the rules based on their status by clicking the filter icon next to All Status.

Cloning or deleting scoring rules

You can clone an existing rule and modify it as needed instead of creating a new rule from scratch. You can also delete a rule if it is no longer needed. When a rule is deleted, all the scores assigned to records by the rule will be deleted along with the fields used for scoring. 

To clone or delete a rule
  1. Go to Setup > Automation > Scoring rule.
  2. Hover over the rule you want to clone or delete in the Scoring Rule list view.
  3. Click the More icon and choose either Clone or Delete.
    1. Clone: Make the required edits to the cloned rule and click Save.
    2. Delete: Confirm that you want to delete rule.

Deactivating a scoring rule

You can deactivate a rule to stop it from being used. When a rule is deactivated, the scores assigned to the records will be retained but no new scores will be calculated. If you reactive the rule, the scoring will resume as configured.
You can change the status of a rule by clicking on Active or Inactive on the rule in the Scoring Rule list view. 

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