Lead scoring vendors, having both lead sellers and lead buyers as clients, have an important responsibility to protect their clients’ data and their intellectual property. For a scoring company to reveal confidential information about a clients’ model to any 3rd party is a significant breach of trust. It is solely the prerogative of the client to reveal any information about a proprietary business process (including lead scoring) as they see fit. 

Don’t get me wrong. I think transparency is important, but exposing proprietary business processes to your partners is a decision that must be carefully weighed – like any other important business consideration. The key question for each client to answer is what is the appropriate level of transparency to expose to the ecosystem? I maintain that the appropriate transparency must be ACTIONABLE to the ecosystem and must not compromise the integrity of the lead generation process. More transparency can certainly lead to improvements in quality, yet there is a moral hazard in revealing too much about a lead score that could invite “gaming” the system.

For those interested, I’ve posted a longer article on this topic on our blog http://www.ebureau.com/blog, including a discussion around common factors typically found in lead scoring models. Having built and reviewed more than 100 predictive models for online lead generation, I can tell you that there is no “smoking gun” when it comes to lead score predictive factors…

Actually there is no secret code to scoring – the scores are developed from the fundamental drivers of a lead buyer’s business – everyone in the food chain needs to understand these drivers so that they can better service each other. So disclosing the key attributes behind scoring is a great innovation for the industry – total transparency – understanding your customers’ business – is what will sustain the growth of their lead gen business.

Also, I think many in the industry tend to overlook a key point when it comes to scoring. Scoring is useless without identities- identification is the key to attributes about potential customers- and attributes are the key to scoring. The matching identities to appropriate attributes part is exceedingly difficult for most data companies to unlock. Same goes for lead verification. TARGUSinfo has published our waterfall business rule verification approach for years– showing exactly how we categorize leads for anyone to see and try to copy. Anyone that tries to copy the process has to have access to the latest data linkages between such things as name, address, mobile, landline, email etc. or the process just doesn’t work. It wouldn’t be accurate without the most accurate real-time identity information.

I’ve posted some additional thoughts related to this topic on our blog as well:

blog.targusinformation.com/

Best,

Dave
davewengel@targusinfo.com

I don’t think buyers profit much from knowing what goes into the score. They are likely to want to just buy leads in a particular score range and unlikely to be allowed lead filterzs based on the predictive factors of conversion. The really sophisticated buyers will run their own score (with help from eBureau and TargusInfo) and figure out which leads they are able to work better than the score suggests and therefore find unique arbitrage opportunities.

However, I am sure that lead sellers/producers absolutely want to know what goes into the score. Them knowing this would no doubt lead to big increases in lead quality as there are definitely factors that determine conversion rates that can be targeted. The dilema for the scoring companies however is that by releasing the secret code to their score, leads would inevitably become more homogenous as providers figure out how to get high-scoring leads. This reduces the value of the score for the lead buyer as the separation in conversion rates becomes less. In other words, it is in the interest of the scoring companies to have an industry where the variability of lead “quality” is high.

I think you are right, but I also think it is a matter of what is the easiest for some people. I see so many companies go for what is the easiest to implement first, rather then what is the best and because “Lead Scoring” is so popular these days companies are will to get anything implemented just for the sake of having implemented lead scoring.

I must say however, its not to say that the easiest is always wrong or bad. Sometimes it is better then nothing at all. I think it may be a matter of expectations.

What are your thoughts about that statement?

When it comes to lead scoring, transparency is paramount. If a lead goes into a ‘black box’ as you mention, and a score comes out – a 1-10, perhaps bronze-platinum’, or A-F – whatever scoring mechanism utilized, that may be viewed as helpful information to predict the likelihood of that lead to take a certain action. However, without transparency into what went into that score or the makeup of the individual, the lead generator is robbed of an opportunity to learn more about why it was a good or bad lead, and how to help the lead buyer find more of the goods. Moreover, in certain instances, lead buyers have used this black box to cut purchases of low-scoring leads, but without providing any insight to the lead generator that could help them. This hurts the lead generators’ ability to help the lead buyer and therefore hurts the entire ecosystem.

My personal view is that some people are afraid to provide true transparency – hording knowledge. However, if we want to learn from the past, we know that efficiencies will continue to drive this marketplace, and transparency between all parts of the ecosystem will drive efficiency – be a part of it, or get left behind.