You, as a marketer or a business owner, are focused on generating more and more leads.
Source: Marketoonist
Who doesn’t want an incoming pool of leads anyway? Every business yearns to have that!
Their main focus lies in learning how to run a successful lead generation campaign.
The major concern with these leads is that not each one of them would be a high-quality lead. That is, not each lead would turn into a paying customer!
This might have aroused a curiosity to learn how to know which leads have the highest probability to turn into your customer.
Here enters lead scoring!
Lead scoring helps you to segregate prospects who are just casual visitors to your website or social media channels, from the prospects with a medium-level interest, and the prospects who have a great deal of interest in your product or service.
Of course, lead scoring includes a set number of metrics to evaluate a lead on. The ZoomInfo lead scoring metrics video below explains that.
Source: Youtube
What’s the business benefit of using lead scoring?
As per a study by DemandGen Report, 41% of those who participated, saw an incremental conversion rate when they adopted lead scoring methodology.
Now that’s a number good enough to give a boost to anyone still thinking of including lead scoring in their business!
Onto the next question: What exactly is lead scoring?
What do you mean by lead scoring?
Lead scoring includes a 2-step process:
- The process begins with determining each criterion that suggests some chances of the lead being sales-ready.
- Then, on the basis of each of those criteria, a score is assigned to that lead.
The sum of the individual scores gives you the total score for each lead that depicts the chances of converting that lead into a buying customer.
In a nutshell, it differentiates a purchase-interested prospect from a lesser interested or a disinterested one.
What does this help with?
This helps the sales and marketing teams decide and strategize the next engagement steps for each of these prospects.
So, can you use a lead scoring template designed and used by any other business for your business?
The answer is no!
Since each business is unique, so are its lead-scoring methodologies. There is no one size fits all approach applicable here!
How do you begin the lead scoring process?
Begin by placing your prospects into two scoring buckets:
- Give them a lead score - This score depicts your prospect’s basic fitment with your business offering. That is, whether their needs fit with your product or service.
- Assign an engagement score to them - This score determines the prospect’s actual interest in your business and the engagement level.
Source: Leadsquared
This would help prevent wasting time on “not-worthy of your time” leads and focus more on the hot leads.
Suspect, Prospect, Lead, Opportunity! What they mean would be much clearer to you!
On the basis of that, you can group different categories of leads together, to understand which ones are almost ready to buy, which ones would need a bit of convincing to purchase from you, and which ones to ignore putting an effort in.
Source: Leadsquared
The most important part of the blog is - What is the importance of lead scoring for your business?
Why is lead scoring important to your business?
Following up with anyone and everyone who has shown interest in your offerings is common practice with most businesses.
On the contrary, following up with prospects who are actually sales-ready is a hack known to just a handful of marketers.
As per a Gartner study, 70% of the leads are lost owing to poor follow-up practices, i.e., not knowing who to follow up with.
Imagine such a great number of people not buying from you because you didn’t pay attention to them when they were actively looking out for solutions similar to yours!
Lead scoring helps improve the overall effectiveness of your business by avoiding losing high-quality leads.
How well-structured lead scoring system helps your business?
Your marketing campaigns turn out to be successful
A lead scoring model helps you identify which marketing campaigns and channels brought about high-quality leads into your system. Based on the findings, you can go ahead and tweak your marketing strategy to bring in more such leads which need just a little bit of nurturing before they purchase from you.
Your sales and marketing departments are well-calibrated
With no results-driven lead scoring system in place, your marketing and sales wings feel unaligned. Having a well-built lead scoring system ensures that each lead that the marketing team passes on to the sales team would be a marketing-qualified lead (MQL).
It means that the marketing team does the job of retaining the high-quality leads, ignoring the pointless leads, and nurturing the medium-interest leads before passing them on to the sales team, for them to follow up and convert them into a paying customer.
A typical lead recycling process for medium-interest leads is depicted in the image below.
Source: Marketo
When there is a consistent inflow of qualified leads for the sales team to do their job, there is a stronger relationship between the marketing and sales team and a better alignment of their processes.
Your business generates a higher ROI
Reaching out to interested leads timely is a game-changer!
It helps build revenue for your business. A day here and there and you can lose that customer to the competition. When you are focusing on those leads who have a higher lead score and are highly qualified, you generate a higher ROI for your business.
To put this in numbers, as per Marketing Sherpa, organizations using lead scoring methodology witness a 77% increase in their ROI.
Whopping, right?
On to your journey towards lead-scoring success
Most businesses do not follow a tactical lead-scoring process. That hampers their growth trajectory by a great deal. They are not able to identify a high-quality lead from a pool of leads.
These businesses spend a lot of time trying to convert worthless leads and miss out on a high-potential customer.
Having a well-strategized lead-scoring methodology in place assists by making the marketing and sales team more effective and efficient in their processes. They are then able to understand which leads to focus on and which leads to passing over.
What are you waiting for? Have a detailed meeting with your team, devise your lead scoring model, and start counting your gains!
