In this digital world, businesses are trying to leverage advanced tools and techniques to maximize their sales efforts. One such technique is lead scoring, which helps you identify your most promising leads. You can employ this information to tailor your marketing strategies to meet the needs of high-scoring leads.
Additionally, if your sales team knows how to prioritize high-potential leads, they can save their time on dead-end prospects. This saved time can be invested in other business tasks to optimize sales and generate more leads.
According to Abdaslam, around 40% of salespeople have benefitted from lead scoring. In this write-up, we’ll discuss lead scoring and how to implement it for maximum benefit. Let’s discuss everything in detail!
What is Lead Scoring 101?
Lead scoring is a technique used in sales and marketing to rank potential leads based on their likelihood to convert into paying customers. It is a process in which you assign a numerical value to leads based on certain factors. These involve demographics, behaviors, interactions with marketing materials, and engagement with your company’s products.
Consider some lead scoring examples. A lead who visits a website multiple times, downloads a whitepaper, and interacts with email campaigns receives a high lead score. In contrast, a lead who only sees the website once and engages a little with your website content may get a low lead score. You can perform lead scoring manually or use automation tools such as CRM. Research says 84% of companies consider CRM the most beneficial automation tool for obtaining qualified leads.
How to Score Lead Points?
Lead scoring is not a one-step process; instead, it involves multiple layers that are discussed below:
1. Create a Buyer Persona
The first step in lead scoring is creating a buyer persona, which is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. A buyer persona can be made of quantitative research, observation, and customer data analysis. It can include interests, preferences, pain points, and customer buying behavior. Creating a buyer persona assists you in understanding your target audience better. So, you can align your lead scoring criteria with the characteristics of your ideal customers.
2. Determine Lead Criteria
Once you clearly understand your buyer persona, you must determine the criteria you need to score leads. These criteria should align with the characteristics of your ideal customer and should be based on relevant data. This data can include lead source, demographic information, engagement level, and behavior. Although the lead criteria can vary depending on your business, the common ones are:
- Demographics: This includes basic information about the lead, such as their job title, company size, & location.
- Behavior: This includes the lead’s actions that indicate buying intent. For instance, website visits, signing up for a free trial, or adding items to a shopping cart, etc.
3. Assign Weightage or Point Values
Giving a lead score aims to identify high-scoring leads that can help you close a deal. This means not all leads can get the same weightage or value. You should assign points based on lead importance and the chances of its conversion. Remember, the weightage or point value should be based on your business goals, sales objectives, and marketing strategies.
For instance, if someone subscribes to your blog updates, they aren’t very likely to become your paying customers. In contrast, if someone requests a demo and adds products to their cart, they are going to be your good paying customers. So, you should assign 5 points to blog subscribers and 20 to 30 points to your customers who request a demo to show strong buying intent.
Communicate with the Sales Team
They play a crucial role in lead scoring, as they are at the front lines of engaging with leads. They understand your customer’s behaviors and needs and quickly determine which lead is going to be a buying customer. Moreover, they can provide insights you may still need to include in your buying persona. So, it’s essential to involve the sales team in the lead scoring process and gather their feedback to fine-tune the scoring criteria.
Get Feedback from Customers
You should contact your consistent and top customers to get more details and insights into top leads. For instance, you can ask them about their early steps before purchasing from you. You can then collect data about the choices and preferences of your ideal customers that help you in lead scoring. Conduct surveys, request feedback, and carry out customer interviews to get this information.
When you get direct feedback from customers, you better understand your target audience. Hence, you can align your lead scoring criteria with their preferences, increasing the accuracy of your lead scoring model.
4. Set Thresholds for Each Criterion
Once you have assigned weightage or point value to each criterion, the next step is to set thresholds for each criterion. Typically, thresholds are predetermined values that indicate whether a lead meets the criteria or not.
For example, if you have assigned a weightage of 10 points to a lead source criterion, you can set a threshold of “website” to indicate that leads coming from the website will receive 10 points.
Meanwhile, leads from other sources may receive fewer points or no points at all, depending upon the assigned weightage and values. Setting a threshold helps your sales team to prioritize quality leads instead of stressing over what to do next.
Although lead scoring manually may seem cost-effective, it’s time-consuming and can result in data inaccuracies. So, to eliminate these issues and streamline your lead generation and scoring, you should go for automation tools. Using sales and marketing automation tools is one of the lead-scoring best practices. These tools automate everything, making your data collection efficient and accurate! Additionally, you can use these advanced tools to do quick lead capture.
Conclusion
Lead scoring may seem like a challenging task, but it’s not. Especially if you are aware of lead scoring models and their best practices, you can quickly implement them to get high-quality leads. However, performing all these tasks manually can be stressful.
