5 Reasons You Should Consider Lead Scoring
5 Reasons You Should Consider Lead Scoring
Sales and marketing alignment is not a new concept, however prioritizing it in your business is a hot topic these days. One of the best ways to start this process is to define lifecycle stages in your business and complement those stages with lead scoring.
The first order of business is generating leads. The second order of business is qualifying, nurturing, and distributing them.
Chew on this for a second… not all leads are equal.
In other words, “people scoring” is a way of quantifying leads so that you can decide and measure how ready they are to pass along to sales. The last thing you want to do is handoff a lead to sales before they are ready.
The lead scoring system will allow you to identify actions/behaviors and attributes for sales qualified and disqualified leads with a point value. This system provides the opportunity to count and rank people’s actions as well as demographics. Lead scoring will also determine a lead’s interest in your brand.
Over time these points will add up and then reach a threshold. This will allows your marketing department to announce a lead who is sales ready.
5 Reasons you should consider lead scoring
- Lead scoring aligns your sales, marketing, and leadership team
- Helps to establish lifecycle stages on a deeper level
- Improves list segmentation ability
- Supports workflow development
- Increases your win rate for leads
In order to following best practices of sales and marketing, you’ve got to set yourself up for success.
1. Lead scoring aligns your sales, marketing, and leadership team
- Define what your issues are with marketing and sales?
- Define business objectives that lead scoring will solve, prioritize, assign values.
- Put energy into developing primary, secondary, and negative buyer personas.
- Identify their triggers, where they go to for information, and what makes them tick.
- Develop a service level agreement each department can agree to.
Check out our Sales Marketing Alignment Checklist.
2. Lead scoring helps to establish lifecycle stages on a deeper level
- Understand how these folks buy and map it to their journey and your lifecycle stages.
- Focus on five major segments to score your leads on. Feel free to leave wiggle room! For example: Specific pages viewed on your website, quote requests, consultations, website visits.
- Don’t over think lead scoring. Build some swim lanes for yourself. Create a variety of scenarios and test your assumptions. Developing against these journies will provide your team with easier relatability. Then determine within each scenario what action your marketing or sales team will take.
- Inbound Marketing takes time and optimizing lead scoring is no different. Better to be broad than too narrow in the beginning. You don’t want to rule people out until you have a solid system in place to do so.
- Determine a standardized scoring system whether it is 1-10 or 1-100. Make it easy for people to calculate and understand the weight.
- Talk with your sales team to get feedback and see if you are missing anything. The more you can collaborate with your team, the better information you will have to work with.
- Track, level-set, iterate. Remember, never stop experimenting.
Manual Lead Scoring vs. Predictive Lead Scoring Sample in HubSpot
If you have a CRM (customer relationship management) software, you may have heard terms like manual and predictive lead scoring. What this means is, with manual you have to do more of the leg work. With predictive, you are able to use past data and insights after the model is created to automate the scoring process. See below for a comparison.
3. Improves list segmentation ability
4. Supports workflow development
According to Agile CRM, here are some things to consider when scoring leads:
Wording the considerations as “additional considerations” and having more context to why they’re relevant/helpful.
- Landing pages: What topics take priority for your leads?
- Links: What your lead clicks can indicate where they are in the buying cycle.
- Videos: What content are they interested in?
- Searches on your site: What is your lead looking for?
- Web behavior: Get a clearer idea of your lead’s interests?
- Downloads: Another indicator of where your lead is in the buying cycle?
- Open emails and email clicks: Both help indicate levels of interest?
Now that we have established some best practices, let’s discuss how all of this preparation leads back to closing deals.
5. Increases your win rate for leads
At the end of the day, after you have invested gobs of time into technology, human capital, training, strategies, and best case scenarios… at a certain point you’ve got to take action. You must do this in a way that will provide the biggest impact in the quickest amount of time.
I’m not telling you that a lead scoring system is the silver bullet to sales success. I’m suggesting lead scoring is one method that will play into a bigger picture that can impact your brand greatly. Lead scoring is part of building your foundation.
Some of the ROI indicators may include:
- Increase on lead to opportunity conversions.
- Increase in sales velocity (faster sales cycles).
- Increase in sales productivity for sales people.
Lead scoring married with big data allows company to get the most out sales and marketing efforts. Big Data needs human interpretation to fully reach its potential. According to Marketing Land, “Ranking leads makes campaigns more efficient and effective, and this sort of ranking data is the information most requested by sales.”
Is your head spinning yet? Do not worry, lead scoring is a skill that takes practice. The more energy you put toward it, the easier it becomes.
Revisit your lead scoring regiment at least twice a year but recommended once per quarter to take into consideration ways you are actively interacting with prospective clients. Recognize your scoring system may need to pivot. Want to talk through your lead scoring system? Schedule a strategy session today!
Here are some additional lead scoring resources to provide support on your lead scoring journey:
HubSpot’s Lead Scoring instructions
HubSpot’s Contact User Guide: How to use manual lead scoring to automate your lead qualification
The Sales Lion’s perspective on Lead Scoring Best Practices