4 Quick Fire Benefits to Using Intercom to Hack Lead Scoring and Forecasting

Like most businesses, our goal is always to increase revenue. In order to do that in SaaS, normally the goal is to simply increase trial users, but what happens when you increase trial users and your sales don’t follow?

This is what happened to us at Brand24, and we developed a system within Intercom to allow us to know what types of trials we were generating and just how many we can expect to convert.

Here’s a little background:

Before we get started: this isn’t revolutionary, lead scoring has been around for a long time. However, implementing this as a new system can be costly. We already loved Intercom and more importantly, it was in place. I wanted to try and find a way to achieve lead scoring and data verification without any extra cost.

In order to lead score, you have to know the categories you want to make. For us it was as follows:

• Top 1% of users – Class A
• Top 5% of users – Class B
• Top 10% of users – Class C
• Top 25% of users – Class D
• Top 50% of users – Class E

So, next we have to use our variable data to achieve this. What is available by default?

• Age of Trial
• Number of Web Sessions
• Last Seen
• Location
• Social Media Accounts

We also via API added some of our key usage metrics from inside the platform:

• Number of Keywords
• Number of Mentions

And this is what we needed to get started. We then prioritized those pieces of data by importance of behaviour to making a purchase.

For us it was as follows:

• Number of Keywords
• Number of Web Sessions
• Number of Mentions
• Location
• Age of trial

Then we kept adding to these amounts until we got to the top 1% of users yet to buy, in our system. The result was as follows:

• Number of Keywords : 3+
• Number of Web Sessions : 5+
• Number of Mentions : 1+
• Location : US
• Age of trial : Under 30 days

This was the birth of our Class A. From this point you work backwards until you have all of your 5 classes, as you can see below. You then save these as segments inside your Intercom account.

4 benefits of having your class system in place

1. You can check the type of traffic you are attracting. For this we use an add-on called Statbot.

As your traffic overall increases, you can see inside Statbot what type of traffic that is.

2. You can forecast results based on conversion rates from each class.

Here are our conversion expectations from each class:

3. You can point your inbound sales and customer success teams in the right direction.

Sales people only have so many minutes per day, so it’s important you service your highest converting leads by priority. Intercom gives a great way for them to get to the best leads fast.

We now set connection and time since last contacted KPIs for each of our classes as below.

4. You can build your buyer persona

Looking at what stage your user was in at the point of purchase / upgrade now allows you to know how to best focus your marketing automation and education to ensure that you move people along the classes.

I hope this was helpful, and if you have any questions about this setup, I will be more than happy to answer them in the comments below.