Although not widely implemented by companies, lead scoring is a strategy that helps businesses classify their prospects according to the value each represents to them. In simple terms, lead scoring is an active filter that applies to each prospect, regardless of their position in the sales funnel. It is a way to classify incoming prospects and assign them priority levels. Your prospects will no longer be grouped based on distinguished similarities. Each of them will have their own score and category.
Lead scoring systems work by assigning specific values to each customer's activity as they move through the different stages of the sales funnel. Each of these actions earns a different number of points. When your prospect obtains a desirable total of points, they are considered a "potential prospect".
The purpose of lead scoring is to learn how to approach your customers to better guide them. You cannot use the same approach for all your customers, especially if they are at different stages of the buying journey. Thus, if you score your prospects correctly, you will know when and where to introduce soft sales and what is the ideal time for harder and more aggressive sales tactics.
Different lead scoring methods vary according to company characteristics.
Lead scoring is not useful for all commercial organizations. There are a few simple questions you should consider before deciding whether lead scoring can benefit your company or not.
Does your marketing team generate enough prospects? If your sales team isn't getting more prospects than they can handle, you probably don't need to spend time setting up a lead scoring system. Instead, encourage your marketing team to focus on bringing more prospects to the top of the funnel.
Did You Know?By automating your collaborators' email signature management, you can accelerate your business opportunities. How exactly? Your collaborators send more than 40 emails per day to your prospects, partners, or clients. Great trust is placed in messages sent by your collaborators. By integrating marketing banners into each of their emails, you will capitalize on a new communication channel that is non-intrusive, ultra-targeted, and inexpensive!
If your sales team isn't getting more prospects than they can handle, you probably don't need to spend time setting up a lead scoring system. Instead, encourage your marketing team to focus on bringing more prospects to the top of the funnel.
Is your sales team processing the prospects it acquires through marketing? Is your sales team complaining about the horrible prospects they receive? Is your marketing team complaining that Sales aren't following up with the prospects they've been given? Then you probably desperately need a service level agreement rather than a lead scoring system.
Organize a meeting with both departments and decide how many prospects marketing should provide to sales each month and how many the sales team should follow up with. Once you manage to set up your service level agreement, you can start considering lead scoring.
For this part, you will need behavioral data, contextual data, and company data about your prospects before you can even set up a lead scoring system. If you don't have the required data, you'll need to take some steps before you can even start lead scoring.
If you answered no to any of these questions, your commercial organization is not yet mature enough to implement relevant lead scoring.
Just as lead scoring improves the conversion rate of leads into opportunities, lead scoring also improves your closing rate. The closing rate represents the number of prospects you were able to convert into paying customers. According to an Eloqua study, based on the analysis of 10 B2B companies using lead scoring, it improved their closing rate by 30%.
Lead scoring serves to define the position of any customer within the funnel. This means that if you reach their ideal point from the start, they will move through the sales cycle much faster. Lead scoring helps maximize sales efficiency because it eliminates the need for guessing and waiting. Lead scoring therefore helps reduce the time to convert prospects into customers.
Being able to measure your return on investment on lead generation will show you exactly how valuable your marketing efforts are. If you know how much you're spending and how much it brings in, you'll be able to allocate your resources more effectively. This allows you to know which tactics aren't worth your time and effort.
Customer segments and personas are high-level groups of people who are interested in your content, services, products, and company at different levels.
To determine what your target market is, ask yourself:
Lead scoring goes beyond static demographic data and concerns the actual behavior of users.
The "five whys" can also help you delve deeper into each of them:
Consider these people as your marketing qualified prospects. They engage with your brand, but they haven't necessarily purchased yet.
The most important part of the lead scoring process is determining the characteristics of people most likely to buy.
When trying to understand the difference between high-engagement behaviors and low (or negative) engagement behaviors, you need to consider three basic types of criteria: explicit, implicit, or negative.
They tell you who the person is and whether or not they fit your ideal customer mold.
Explicit criteria metrics:
This is behavioral data that tells you how interested a person is in your service, product, or company. It doesn't tell you if they're suitable for your business, it simply indicates if they interact with your content.
For implicit criteria, consider metrics such as:
Some of this information is accessible especially if you have created a professional website.
These tell you exactly the opposite. It tells you about people you should start ignoring because they're simply not interested in you.
For negative criteria, consider occurrences such as:
When creating your point system, you want to assign more points to higher engagement actions and fewer points (or negative) to low engagement actions.
Here is an example of a lead scoring table based on activity:
Did You Know?By automating your collaborators' email signature management, you can accelerate your business opportunities. How exactly? Your collaborators send more than 40 emails per day to your prospects, partners, or clients. Great trust is placed in messages sent by your collaborators. By integrating marketing banners into each of their emails, you will capitalize on a new communication channel that is non-intrusive, ultra-targeted, and inexpensive!
Each time someone takes an action, they receive the points associated with that action. All points are added up to a total.
The higher the total, the more interested the prospect is. The lower the total, the more likely it is that you should let the prospect go.
To assign point categories and communicate them to your teams, ask yourself these questions:
For lead scoring, there are no universal benchmarks from other companies.
Instead, you must continuously test and refine your ideal customer assumptions so that your scoring system ultimately does what it’s meant to do: deliver high-value prospects, nurture those in the middle, and politely filter out the unqualified ones.
Work closely with your sales team and your SMB CRM system to identify issues and iterate until you achieve an effective lead scoring model.
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