While your company’s marketing group focuses on generating more sales leads, it’s up to the sales team to close the deal. It sounds like a simple process with each department playing to its strengths, but it’s not that easy. Lead scoring can help prioritize your top leads, increase conversions, and improve communication between your marketing and sales departments
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is a process that ranks potential customers using criteria to determine which leads are ready to make a purchase
- Prioritizes leads, improves company communication and productivity, decreases customer acquisition costs, and increases overall revenue
- Offers solutions for generating traffic, researching high-quality leads and accurately measuring ROI
Process Automations
Automated features within CRMs can do the work for you
- Predictive scoring utilizes thousands of criteria to identify the best leads automatically
- Successful lead scoring can save your business money, boost revenue, strengthen customer relationships, and foster teamwork among sales and marketing departments
How does lead scoring work?
Create specific criteria for your business’s industry or customer base, and assign a number value (usually 1-100) for those data points
- Once you set thresholds, use this data to connect to your preferred customer relationship management (CRM) software
- The CRM system can send you a real-time notification when a lead meets the point threshold, allowing you to follow up with them before a competitor does
Lead criteria
Use any marketing data you have, and strive to create more detailed marketing attribution and contacts reports so you can narrow down lead-scoring opportunities.
- FYI: It’s essential to gather insight from your sales team and interact with your customers as much as possible.
Benefits of lead scoring
Increased sales efficiency: With a follow-up list full of qualified leads that meet the lead-scoring threshold, your sales team can spend more time closing sales qualified leads (SQL) and less time with contacts who aren’t ready to buy
- Lower customer acquisition costs: Marketers can quickly remove marketing dollars from channels that are below the threshold
- Improved conversion rates: Automated drip emails keep leads with a lower score engaged until they’re ready to purchase
- Collaboration between departments: Since lead scoring provides a factual score for each lead, marketers can rest assured they are providing practical leads to sales, while salespeople can confidently close the deal
- Advanced targeting
- Stronger relationships
- Lead scoring improves segmentation among your leads
- Personalizing content, sales calls and customer service requests can create repeat customers and glowing referrals
Tests of lead quality
Take all leads and allow your sales team time to follow up with each one, regardless of their value on paper
- After a few weeks, re-examine the same leads and see which ones became customers and which ones didn’t
- Use this to learn more about your customers, and the strengths of your sales and marketing teams
Lead-scoring best practices
Don’t get caught up in the details
- Decide on processes
- Connect your CRM
- Check to see if your current CRM has lead-scoring integration
- Clean up data
- Some leads will never convert to customers
- Remove their data from the system to free up space for prospects
Lead profiles
Separate your leads into two groups: converted leads and dead leads
- Create segments within your leads by separating buyers into buyer personas
- Make these segments using existing customer data and overall observations of your sales
- Use lead-scoring criteria to rank all your converted leads
Lead-scoring categories
Demographic and firmographic: information related to location, industry, company size and job title
- Behavioral: how a lead interacts with your company
- Email engagement: Lead scoring assigns points to leads based on open rates and click rates
- Social engagement: This kind of data shows how active leads are on your social media networks
- A sharp rise in lead scoring should trigger a sales follow up
