How To Smash Your Sales Goals With A Scorecard Marketing Campaign

There’s something about personality tests, behaviour analyses and benchmarking that make humans want to know how they score. Whether it’s just for fun or to make improvements in a certain area of life or business, we want answers and we’re prepared to trawl through questions to get them.

Businesses are borrowing from psychology and incorporating scorecards into their marketing. Consisting of an advanced quiz or survey, scorecards invite potential customers to answer questions and read the subsequent, tailored results. This approach speaks directly to the ego and curiosity of prospects, as they swap their contact details for insights.

Steven Oddy is technical cofounder of ScoreApp, a software platform that enables entrepreneurs to create custom scorecards their prospects love to complete. With over 1500 businesses on board, the scorecards are generating warm leads and useful insights for their users and the appeal is universal. “Scorecard marketing is even more beneficial for a company that needs to get to know a customer before they make a sale. This includes consultants, coaches, fitness trainers and financial planners,” Oddy explains. “It’s common to see companies that introduce scorecard marketing triple their number of leads each month.”

Scorecards are different to surveys because the person filling in a survey doesn’t usually get anything back in return. A scorecard, however, returns a useful, personalised report as soon as the questions are complete. This means a business can automate the process of gaining credibility, understanding a customer, building brand affinity and giving advice.

I interviewed Oddy to find out how businesses and individuals can generate leads with a scorecard marketing campaign.

1.    Create a catchy concept

The first rule of your scorecard is that your target audience has to be compelled into completing it. Oddy advises that you, “think about your typical customer and what they wish they could have or become. Then create a scorecard that measures whether they are on track for their desire.” This might manifest in a scorecard that measures whether or not someone is ready to sell their business, advance their career or hire another team member. It might measure someone’s leadership style, entrepreneurial blind spots or financial risk profile.

“The opportunities for scorecard marketing are endless but the concept is key.” Take a sheet of paper and a pen and start playing around with titles. Dig deep into the wants and needs of your customer and think about what they really want to know.

2.    Write compelling questions

Once the title and concept are secured, the questions follow. “You need to write between ten and fifty questions that your target audience members will answer,” explained Oddy, whose team advised that these answers are simply, yes, no and sometimes or maybe. “Behind the scenes, you allocate or deduct points based on how people answer each question. After completion, results are automatically tallied, and the respondent sees a report based on how they scored.”

To help the questions flow, think in pillars. Break what your company does into four or five key topics and create four or five questions for each. For example, a financial advisor might ask five questions within the categories of family, risk, income, goals and assets. Answering yes, no or maybe to these twenty-five questions is likely to give a detailed profile of someone’s financial situation.

3.    Make the results valuable

When you write the questions, try not to lead people down a certain path or trick them into answering in a certain way. You want the answers to be authentic and the results meaningful. “As a rule of thumb, think of someone as scoring low, medium or high in each category, and therefore the scorecard as a whole,” explained Oddy. Continuing with the financial planner example, someone might score medium overall but high in income and goals and low in family and risk, based on the answers they gave to the questions.

To interpret these labels into valuable feedback, write accompanying copy based on their score. “If someone scores low, give them ideas on how to improve. If someone scores well, you should help them maintain their results.” Give them pointers, direct them to resources, or simply encourage and support.

4.    Share far and wide

Being confident with the quality and value of your scorecard comes after testing it with your close network and existing clients. “After testing and iterating, you are ready to promote your scorecard.” Oddy explained their users share their scorecards, “on social media and in emails to their database. Many run ads across social platforms or link to the scorecard from their blog posts.”

Every scorecard completion gives valuable data and insights into your target audience. The more you have, the more you will know how to serve them. “More importantly,” added Oddy, “each person who completes your scorecard represents someone who has shown significant interest in what you do.”

5.    Follow up

“Now is not the time to be shy or delay action,” advised Oddy. “Follow up with these leads, book them into meetings or events and make sales.” The best results have come from contacting leads within two days of doing the scorecard. Just don’t let them go cold. “Talk to them about their scores and then ask if they want to make improvements with the support of your business.” If someone has completed a scorecard, they have signalled that seeing progress in your area of expertise is a priority.

Rather than calling a prospect and making small talk about the weather or current affairs, talk to them about their score. Use their scorecard completion as an excuse to empathise, build rapport and position yourself as the person to help them achieve the transformation they seek.

Whether you use a paid or free app or you create one manually yourself, scorecards are effective because they are grounded in solid business principles. Be interested in your customers, understand their needs and talk to them about themselves. Converting fans and followers into scorecard completions means your audience members are giving up their time to give you their information. Look after it wisely and don’t waste the opportunity.