From my earlier entry about how to track prospects on your Web site, you can tell I’m kind of a geek when it comes to this stuff. Website traffic tracking is one way of tracking the activity of your prospects, but its only one measure. In the world of marketing, you’ll hear a lot about Lead Scoring — which is literally a “score” of a prospect’s activity and/or profile. I’ll show you how you can implement activity lead scoring (on “extrinsic factors,” as our corporate friends describe it) with a little hack inside Infusionsoft.

Here’s how we’re going to score leads:

If someone fills out a particular Web Form, give them 10 points. If they click an important trackable link, add 20 points. If they attend a live event, give them 30 more points. The result is, you can then filter out leads by activity and only work with leads that are HOT (they have lots of points).

What we need to know:
Infusionsoft doesn’t currently have a native way to score leads and there’s not a way to auto “increment” a custom field that is an integer (number) value. However, you can create Action Sets that keep score for you. You’ll also need to understand Conditional Actions fairly well, but I’ll explain for you.

Before you get started, its best to define your Lead Score range and the score increments. Then, define how many points people might get for different activities. When I did this for us, I decided that the scores would range from 0 to 100+ and they’d be in 10-point increments. I give people 10 points for downloading free reports, 20 points for downloading The Edge (our most successful eBook), and 30 points for attending live events like Webinars and stuff. Once you have that stuff figured out, you’re ready to start building your lead scoring action sets.

Lastly, you need to decide how you will track your scores. You can do it in a custom field — (pro: you can merge it into emails, tasks, etc. con: you can’t see it on the main contact screen) — or you can do it with tags (pro: you can see it on the main contact screen. con: you can’t merge it into any info).

How to Score Leads with Tags
To build lead scores at 10 points each and apply the data to Tags.

1. Create a new Action Set. (Click the link to see how on the Fusebox…)
2. Select from the Actions Menu to Add Tag and tag the name: “Lead Score: 100+”
3. Add a condition to that action. The condition should be “Lead Score Equals 100.” The condition is true if the person has the “Lead Score: 100” tag.
4. Then add another action, remove tag: “Lead Score: 100.”
5. And yes, do the same thing for 90, 80, 70, 60, 50, 40, 30, 20, and 10.

Yes, I know it’s laborious, I’ll admit. Nevertheless, it works. We use it here every day at Infusionsoft.

More on scoring leads this way:

For this to work, you need to run the actions in reverse. In other words, you need to start with your highest score and count down. The logic flows like this: For adding 10 points – if the person has the tag “Lead Score: 100″, then we need to add the tag “Lead Score: 100+”, then we need to remove the tag “Lead Score: 100″. If that condition wasn’t true, then we move to the next one down. If the person as the tag “Lead Score: 90″, then we need to add the tag “Lead Score: 100″, then we need to remove the tag “Lead Score: 90″. If that condition wasn’t true, then we move to the next one down. If the person as the tag “Lead Score: 80″, then we need to add the tag “Lead Score: 90″, then we need to remove the tag “Lead Score: 80″. And so on and so on.

How to Score Leads with Custom Fields
To track lead scores via Custom Fields in Infusionsoft

The logic is the same as the previous Tag example.  Create custom field that is an integer value. Then, when you run your conditional actions, instead of applying one tag and removing another, just use the action “Set a contact field to a specific value”, and set the number value of the current score.  It’s really that easy.

At Infusionsoft, we use both methods simultaneously. That way, the reps can see the current score on the home screen of any contact record immediately and we can merge the custom field score into email notifications we send out when someone purchases our marketing software. Armed with this information, I can determine the average lead score at the time of purchase. For obvious reasons, that is super powerful info to have as a marketer.  You can take this data a step further and start follow-up sequences or assign tasks to a sales representatives as soon as a prospect reaches that “hot” lead score.  This way, you don’t have to run the query every day. The hot leads are automatically assigned to your best closers — it’s magical!

Tracking Dynamic Leadsources…
At InfusionCon, I shared some code that I previously shared at last year’s user conference on how to track lead sources dynamically, how to track keywords that people search on, and some other cool stuff. Since I posted it a year ago, and everything still applies, I’ll just reference it here.

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I know there are additional requests for code and methods for doing crazy stuff, but I can’t remember them all. If I left something out or if you think you can stump me with a problem that you think Infusionsoft can solve, post it comments below and I’ll try to help.

Thanks and Get INFUSED!

–Tyler

You might also like these blog entries:

• Advanced Website Tracking with Infusionsoft
• Advanced Open Email Tracking With Infusionsoft
• Build Custom Reports with the Infusionsoft and Google Analytics API