Lead scoring is a way for your sales department to put a number around how valuable a lead is. With lead scoring, each customer behavior or each action by the customer is given a certain value and the sum of these values together is the lead score. It differs for each company but is in general understood as the interest someone shows in the company during different stages of the buyer’s cycle. Some companies follow a rather simple metric of assigning leads as either hot, warm or cold based on interactions.
Why Should I Use Lead Scoring and Not Another Method?
Because lead scoring eliminates most of the guesswork from your marketing campaigns.
Lead scoring may not sound easy. But once you start implementing lead scoring, the benefits are immediately evident. Some companies report a 77% increase in lead generation as a result of implementing lead scoring. It’s that effective.
Manual Lead Scoring
Calculate the lead-to-customer conversion rate of all of your leads
The lead to customer conversion ratio is the number of new customers divided by the leads you get. Use the conversion rate as a benchmark for this.
How do you score customers
Leads are scored based on their actions, such as downloading an ebook or filling out a form, and then ranked by likelihood of converting into customers. Higher scores indicate that these prospects are more likely to convert into customers than those with lower scores.
Lead scoring can be achieved by using different factors like behavior, activity, demographics and other metrics that can be collected from the lead’s interactions with the company.
Demographic information
Do you target leads only within a certain demographic? Are you looking for people with a certain profession? Begin by asking demographic questions in the landing pages and use the answers they give to qualify if people belong to the ideal target audience you want.
Add negative points to people who fall under categories you’re not targeting. This can be the wrong geography, the wrong country and more.
Also keep optional spaces for entering phone numbers.
Company Information
If you target b2b leads things like the company size matter more.
Online Behavior
The interaction of a lead shows you how keen they are on purchase. Which offers did they download? Which landing page magento did they get? Did they visit your site repeatedly are all questions worth asking.
The number of forms and form types are important. You can assign higher lead scores from people visiting pricing pages. Or those filling information to get a demo request.
Email Engagement
If someone signed up to get emails from you the behavior on the email can indicate how interested they are in buying from you. Did they open the emails from the lead nurture series? Did they click through promotional campaigns and if they’re clicking the links in the emails?
Social Engagement
Another pointer to note is their engagement on social media. Are they retweeting your company’s tweets?
How Do You Know What Matters Most?
There’s a lot of data available but how do you figure out what matters most?
Ideally ask your sales team, go through analytics data and ask your customers to understand which content is most valuable.
Sales reps are the ground staff who deal with leads and customers alike. They know what kind of material will help you with a conversion. Which blog posts and offers will send you leads. Or what should be the concerns addressed on a landing page.
Talk to your customers
The sales team might give a few pointers. But, no answer they give will accurately reflect how your customers feel about you. You want to hear opinions and reports from both ends.
With the help of customer interviews you can understand their decisions.
When interviewing customers interview everyone who had a short sales cycle and long sales cycle with you.
Next run an attribution report
An attribution model will help you figure the kind of content people accessed prior to them turning to leads. With the attribution model it becomes really simple for you to award points to someone who’s downloaded a guide that conquered more people into leads.
Another thing you can do is use a contacts report. The report shows how many contacts are there and how much revenue they each generated. A contacts report shows the marketing activities that included downloads, click throughs for emails and more
How do you set up a scoring system
A lead scoring system isn’t very complex. Here’s all that you need to create one:
1. Define your customer criteria: Identify who’s a good lead. Write down everything a lead must be to result in conversions. If you want to work with customers in a certain geography add this to the criteria. If you want to work with a company of a certain size opr certain profits then write down that too.
2. Identify a customer behavior process: Write down a roadmap regarding how leads must behave before they convert. Say a list of instructions like visiting your site, subscribing to an email list, registering for a webinar. Understanding the behaviour helps you understand if a lead is close to conversion.
3. Assign point values to each action: Once you develop an idea regarding the steps to a conversion, add scores based on the actions the lead may take. The score may be between 1 to 10.
4. Determine a minimum qualification score: Next add the minimum score that qualifies the leads. This is the number of points a lead must have before they are said to be qualified.
5. Use a lead scoring tool: It’s super easy to add a lead scoring system but it’s not possible to keep track of the scores manually. You need a CRM or a marketing automation tool for this.
6. Refine and adjust your scores : The lead’s journey starts as a random person and ends when turning into a customer. These changes imply that your lead scoring process needs to be dynamic. Create a regular audit and recheck your scores from time to time.
Is One Lead Score Enough?
If you have one set of core customers, a single score is enough. But as you grow bigger and sell to more audiences you get more products that cover more geographics and expand further. For instance, HubSpot’s product flywheel targets a wide range of customers like ones need email marketing, automation, funnel building, CRM software and more.
If your contacts aren’t the one size fit all the scoring system shouldn’t belong there.
With a few marketing platforms you have multiple lead-scoring systems where you have the flexibility to qualify a number of different contacts.
What is lead scoring in CRM
In most CRMs lead score identifies the numerical value assigned to a lead that indicates the potential of the person turning to a paying customer.
How lead scoring works
The leads that enter the CRM are marked cold. At this stage you have zero information on them. A sales rep calls them up and asks for information. The answers the lead provides helps the sales rep assign points to each answer.
The company size is a factor. Who the sales rep talks to (CEO, CMO) is another factor.
There are also automatic lead scoring crms that score hajor like clicking the links inside the emails requesting for quotes eatc points.
The interest of the contacts vs how fit they are to listen to your marketing
If the sales team wants to understand if customers are the right fit as in with their region, the industry and role.You can great a fit score and reach out to those that are the most fit.
Multiple Personas
If you’re a software company selling software to different sales teams and figgernet buyers look for the buyer fit and their interest in the tools. Then use the scores to the sales teams.
New Leads vs Existing Customers
As you begin growing, you can keep the focus sharp on cross-sells or ups-sells. What shows the quality of new prospects and of existing prospects look completely different.
For new prospects pay attention to demographics and site engagement , for existing customers look at the number of support tickets.
There are multiple ways for you to calculate lead score
Benefits of lead scoring that marketing
It helps marketers understand which leads are more likely to convert into customers, and which ones are not.
The benefits of lead scoring can be summed up as follows:
- Lead scoring helps marketing team identify potential customers.
- Lead scoring helps marketing team understand the customer’s buying cycle.
- Marketing teams can easily see who has been contacted and who needs to be contacted next.
- Lead scoring allows marketing teams to allocate leads efficiently and maximize their efforts.
This system is used by many marketing teams because it helps them to prioritize their efforts and allocate resources in the most efficient way.
- Prioritizing leads.
- Allocating resources.
- Improving conversion rates.
- Reducing costs.
Improve sales efficiency
Lead scoring gives you insights regarding how close customers are to a purchase.
No one wants to be pressured to buy something. Instead, they want to buy when they’re ready. The same is true for running online sales. You don’t want to send so much information to a prospect that people get annoyed and leave the store.
Lead scoring helps you understand at which stage of the marketing journey your prospects are in currently. And if the sales person should make the call.
Increased Marketing Effectiveness
Lead scoring provides you a window into the ROI from your marketing. You can see which channels are contributing to high-quality leads. This way you can make informed decisions and help you decide areas to spend more of your marketing budget on.
Lead scoring helps you nurture leads. You can identify all who are in the buying cycle and send relevant content to them.
Providing information at the right time is the best way to grow trust and have clients.
Improved Sales & Marketing Alignment
Lead scoring helps build the teamwork between marketing and sales teams. The two must work together to get close to sales-ready leads. Understanding who converts best is the key to success here.
What is Predictive Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring is critical to find the right prospects for your business. Predictive lead scoring works on top of the traditional leads scoring approach. Here machine learning algorithms automatically evaluate a large number of prospects against a set criteria and rank them on a scale. At the end, you get prospects who are most likely to convert.
Predictive lead scoring generates a singular metric that shows you the perceived value of prospects. This lets the marketing team run campaigns for maximizing the return from these prospects.
How to Develop the Predictive Lead Scoring Model?
Predictive lead scoring model works by identifying attributes from your list of customers.
Determine what’s your goal for optimization be it customer retention, conversion or anything else for that matter.
What is Einstein lead scoring
Einstein Lead scoring uses the power of data science and machine learning to understand how your business generates leads. Based on this, the platform products which leads to pay most attention to. Using machine learning Einstein lead scouring offers a simpler and better solution than the usual lead scoring approaches available.
Einstein lead scoring model analyzes past leads to determine which traits current leads share together.r It scores the leads with lead fields.
Einstein also has categories for lead text fields.
Additionally, the model uses the data for a unique predictive model for your business. It re-analyzes the data again in 10 days and refreshes the score.
What is lead scoring in Eloqua
There are two aspects of lead scoring in Eloqua:
- Profile Score: The profile score depends on the data pointers associated with an account. These pointers are job role, revenue and industry. This points to whether the person has decision making capacity. Eloqua scores prospects as one of these: A B C and D with A being the best fit.
- Engagement Score: The engagement score highlights data on activities of the prospect. These include site visits and email opens and clicks. The score ranges from 1 to 4 with 1 being the highest.
Next you get a visual representation of the rating of a lead depending on the above factors.
Conclusion
What do you think of the different lead scoring models discussed here? Do let us know in the comments below?
