Have you ever wondered how businesses prioritise their leads and decide which ones to pursue? That's where lead scoring comes in. As a marketing automation specialist, I've learned the importance of identifying and prioritising leads based on their behaviour and engagement with a company. During my internship at Zooma, I suggested implementing a lead scoring system to improve their sales process. In this article, I'll explore the power of lead scoring and how it can help businesses better understand and connect with their potential customers.
What is lead scoring, and how does it work?
Lead scoring is a method used by sales and marketing teams to evaluate the buying readiness of their leads and identify high-qualified leads. Lead scoring uses a points scale (usually from 1 – 100) based on specific criteria such as job title, company size, and engagement level. The score tells the converting status of every lead, which means the higher the lead's score, the more the lead is ready to buy.
Why is lead scoring essential for a company?
- Increase efficiency and improve quality: Lead scoring enables businesses to prioritise and focus on the most qualified leads based on relevant criteria, resulting in increased efficiency and cost savings for their sales and marketing teams.
- Alignment between sales and marketing teams: Lead scoring can connect and fill the gap between sales and marketing teams. Thereby giving a mutual understanding of the status of every lead.
- High conversion rate and more revenue: By focusing on high-qualified leads, businesses can increase their conversion rates and generate more revenue from their sales efforts.
- More effective marketing campaigns: Identifying high-qualified leads by using Lead scoring helps to personalise, customise and choose the right marketing strategy for the right marketing channel.
How to build the perfect lead scoring model for your company
- Step 1: Identify your ideal lead by choosing criteria: The first step to building the correct lead scoring model is choosing different factors and criteria that are relevant to your business. This can include demographic data such as Job title, number of employees, Industry type, location, etc. Also, behaviour data, such as time spent on the website, form submission, content downloaded, etc.
- Step 2: Assign the points for each lead: After identifying your ideal lead and choosing the relevant criteria, the next step will be determining the points for every matched lead. For example, a lead who visited your website three times gets 5 points, another who downloaded a template gets 10 points, or submitted a form gets 20 points, etc.
- Step 3: Set up lead scoring in your CRM system: This is a crucial step to get started with your model; this can be done manually or using external tools. Consider using both positive and negative score points no matter how you do it. Unsubscribing from your email list is an example of a negative score.
- Step 4: Automate the lead scoring process: Using workflows on your CRM system, you can trigger a series of events or actions when a lead reaches a particular score. For example, sending a specific email or offering a particular piece of content,
- Step 5: Analyse results and optimise the model: After implementing and automating the model, you need to analyse the performance and control the results to make any necessary improvements.
In conclusion, lead scoring is essential to help your company identify the most promising leads, prioritise sales efforts, and ultimately close more deals.
If you want to improve your sales process and connect with your potential customers more effectively, consider implementing a lead-scoring system today.
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