Lead Scoring Best Practices
To compete effectively in today’s digital world, companies have had to stretch their resources and truly think ‘out of the box.’ Every lead has significant value, and that is why marketers use lead scoring as a way of rating their prospective clients. Essentially, lead scoring will prioritize clientele, measure their interaction, and provide invaluable information for determining the next step in the sale funnel and in improving profitability.
Lead scoring is referred to as the “value” assigned to each lead or potential customer. The lead’s assigned value is used by sales and marketing teams to determine its “worth,” based on certain lead scoring attributes such as the level of engagement and contact information.
Let’s look at some of the basics of creating a lead score and examples of attributes to take into consideration.
Lead Scoring Models
Before you create a model, organize your leads into two categories for fast implementation:
- Explicit scoring
- Implicit scoring
Demographic
Understanding your audience base is key to inbound marketing. Researching the companies you are focusing on is always valuable
Explicit Lead Scoring
Examples of explicit lead scoring include:
- Job title
- Position (seniority)
- Experience
- Industry
- Size
- Revenue
Customer Behaviour
Getting insights into how your customers are engaging with your site can help you distinguish strengths and weaknesses. If a customer visits your website often, you might give them a higher lead score. This will help you focus your marketing efforts on content or clients that are performing the best.
Implicit Lead Scoring
Examples of implicit scoring include:
- Website visits
- Social media interactions
- Email interactions
- Subscriptions
- Contacts
- Clicks/Opens
This scoring process helps sales and marketing teams prioritize and group different clients when conducting an inbound marketing strategy. This makes it easier to gauge which leads are in the buying cycles, what they are interested in, and the best way to continue the relationship with them to close a sale.
3 Key Considerations when Building a Lead Scoring Matrix
Lead scoring is important; leads often disappear faster than they arrived, making time a major factor when it comes to lead management. Building a lead scoring matrix can be done by considering the following things:
1. Lead Scoring Criteria
Before you can even begin to score your leads, you need to figure out the criteria that shall be utilized to calculate the score. Consider any combination of:
- Business type
- Location of the business
- Number of employees
- Website visits
- Content downloads
- Form Completions
Collecting data to score prospects can take time. It can also be cumbersome for your leads to fill out lengthy forms. Research shows that scoring form completion rates are higher when the minimum amount of information is requested.
2. Establish a Threshold
The best results from lead scoring are obtained when you have a threshold that separates the ‘sales-ready’ prospects from the ones that still need to be nurtured.
Set a threshold; decide on a score you can utilize for different criteria, then choose a few likely situations and use the total score as your baseline.
3. Automate Lead Scoring
Now that you have determined the criteria and threshold you shall be using, you will need to use a Marketing Automation Platform to help compile and manage your scoring. The automation will help to:
- Decrease resource time spent on repetitive tasks
- Help sales reps know what to say, and when to say it
- Align sales and marketing to improve campaigns and increase sales.
It can be fairly difficult to develop and execute an efficient lead-scoring strategy without the proper tools or technology however, we are here to help. 360 Integral Marketing uses a variety of CRM systems to help you better manage your leads, campaigns, and accounts. If you are launching an ABM strategy or a digital lead generation program, we offer optimal lead-scoring capabilities with marketing automation tools that will model, automate, and predict the scoring of your prospects.
