Do You REALLY Need Predictive Lead Scoring?

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About this episode

Predictive lead scoring: to do or not to do? That has always been the question in marketers' minds today when machine learning has become all the rage.

But do you really need predictive lead scoring? On a recent episode of MadFiles, Sam Levan, CEO of MadKudu, dispels the myth that everyone needs predictive lead scoring, and tells you when (and how!) it can truly be impactful for you to generate more Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) in your pipeline.

Sam has worked with hundreds of B2B SaaS companies such as Drift, Segment and Amplitude to build marketing operation engines that generate scalable pipeline growth.

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"Not everyone needs lead scoring"

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If you have 3 or less Sales reps in your team, don't even think about predictive lead scoring.

Focus on building a lead generation pipeline to funnel a significant volume of leads for your Sales reps.

However, if you have more than 3 people in your Sales team and are feeding a significant volume of leads to them, it's now time to assess whether you can use predictive lead scoring to generate more SQLs.

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"50% of opportunities won come from leads that are not obviously great"‍

After studying lead pipelines of more than 100 B2B companies, Sam has seen that on average, half of closed deals come from non-obviously good leads.

This is shocking. What this means is that if you have a strict criteria or a point based lead qualification system, you're basically excluding 50% of deals that could have closed.

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But, this is also where predictive lead scoring can help: it helps to differentiate between the not obviously good or bad leads.

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How to test whether you should use predictive lead scoring to generate more SQLs

So here's the 5 minutes (or less) trick to test if predictive lead scoring is useful for you:

✅Step 1: Go to your CRM platform
✅Step 2: Pull a random list of 10 recently closed deals
✅Step 3: Measure % of closed deals that come from non-obviously good leads

If you find that a significant number of deals won come from leads are not obviously good, there is a big opportunity to use predictive lead scoring to generate more SQLs.

If not, don't worry about it and move on to the next item in your to-do list.