When you start implementing inbound marketing, you worry about not getting enough leads in the funnel. However, once you have a large number of leads, you realize not all leads will convert into sales. That’s when lead scoring comes in.
In pochi punti:
What Is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring can be understood as the process of assigning values.
Generally, these values are assigned in the form of numerical points to every lead that is generated.
LeadsIn web marketing, leads are prospects who are interested in buying your products or services. This is obviously the main goal for most businesses out there: to generate quality leads.... can be scored on the basis of several attributes such as professional information, how they engaged with your brand or website.
This helps the marketing and sales team prioritize and respond to leads in an appropriate and timely manner. These leads when dealt with in a timely manner turn into satisfied customers.
Each business has a unique model for assigning points to score their lead. However, the most common way is to use data from previous leads to create a value system.
Wondering how you can do that?
First, take into account all your contacts who were your first customers. Find out what they have in common.
Now, look at all the contacts who did not become your customers and find out their common attributes.
Once you have examined the data of both sets of contacts, you’ll be able to decide which attributes carry the most importance based on how likely a person is going to purchase your product.
Lead scoring a method to categorize prospects by their level of commitment.
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The process of lead scoring is easy. Depending on the type of business you’re in, you can create your own business model.
To help you do that, we’ll walk you through the basics of how lead scoring works, lead scoring models, lead scoring benefits, importance, examples of lead scoring and how to reduce negative lead scoring.
How Does Lead Scoring Work?
Generally, lead scoring can be measured between 1 to 100.
For instance, if ‘Lead 1’ engaged with your brand on social media (10 points), filled the form on the landing page (20 points) and read the weekly newsletter (15 points). The total score would be 45 points.
However, ‘Lead 2’ read an article on your blog (5 points), visited your social media account but did not engage (5 points) and subscribed for the newsletter (5 points). The total score would be 15 points.
On the basis of this information, Lead 1 has a higher score as their activity resembled a qualified lead as compared to Lead 2.
Therefore, Lead 1 is worthy of your time and effort.
The Importance of Lead Scoring
According to a report by MarketingSherpa, a whopping 73% of B2B leads are not sales-ready.
This means that your sales team can spend a lot of time pursuing leads that won’t convert.
Eventually, this will result in a loss of time and effort.
This is where lead scoring comes into play. It helps bridge the gap between the marketing and sales teams.
Here are five reasons why lead scoring is important:
#1. Helps Prioritize Leads
Lead scoring helps prioritize leads based on the prospect’s desire to buy. Follow-up is effective when implemented close to the prospect’s initial interest. It helps focus on leads that actually matter.
For instance, there are two prospects ‘Prospect A’ and ‘Prospect B’ who wish to buy the same product. To determine who’s more interested, you can use a lead scoring model.
A lead scoring model will take into account both prospects activities such as:
- The time prospect A and B spent on your website
- If they liked the post on your social media channels
- If they followed you on your social media channels
- Sent an inquiry regarding the product via direct messaging/emailing/calling you
Depending on the lead scoring model you implement, the lead score will be calculated.
Let’s say, prospect A had a score of 95, whereas B had a score of 70. It’s wise that you follow up with prospect A first as he seems more interested and ready to purchase the product with little assistance.
However, since prospect B isn’t that interested, he may require more assistance and should, therefore be contacted later.
#2. Provides Valuable Insights
Lead scoring helps understand who the prospect is, how interested they are in a particular product and the reason why they didn’t directly purchase the product.
Marketers, when equipped with this knowledge can create effective marketing strategies to convince the prospect to buy the product.
In addition, it helps you understand how prospects interact with your organisation. Examples include:
- Webinar registration
- Social media engagement
- Content downloads
- Form submissions
- Free trial requests
- Web page visits
- EmailAn email (or electronic mail) is a method of exchanging communications through the internet. It is one of the most used features on the web and the number one mean... subscription
- Email opens
#3. Helps Create Effective Campaigns
Lead scoring allows you to identify channels or campaigns that result in high-quality leads. This gives you the opportunity to optimise your marketing strategy to generate more high-quality leads.
Once you know which platforms work the best for you, you can then optimise those marketing channels.
For instance, if your products selling more on Instagram, you should focus on Instagram marketing rather than other platforms.
#4. Marketing and Sales Alignment
Having an effective lead scoring system is a sure shot way to ensure that your marketing and sales teams are working in the same direction.
Once you have a proper system in place, every lead that you pass to the sales department will be qualified.
Therefore, it will strengthen the bond between both the departments that will help facilitate better marketing and sales alignment.
When employees are able to close more deals, it makes them confident, boosts their morale and increases their motivation.
Harmony is established among both departments which helps increase productivity and overall revenue.
#5. Increases Revenue
When qualified leads are contacted in a timely manner, it increases the revenue.
Since lead scoring also helps identify and discard low-value leads, you are able to focus on high-value leads.
This, in turn, helps you close deals that are high in value and build a loyal customer base.
Lead scoring helps simplify, streamline and improve the process of sales and marketing in your organisation. This helps generate more revenue and sales.
5 Lead Scoring Benefits Every Marketer Should Know
Implementing a lead scoring system is imperative if you wish to run a profitable business. Here are five lead scoring benefits you should know:
- Helps focus on leads that matter: by ranking the quality of your leads.
- Increases productivity: by sorting out high-quality leads.
- Aligns Marketing and Sales: helps both departments collaborate and mutually benefit each other.
- Improves the Understanding of Leads: by collecting, analyzing and making sense of behavioural and demographic data.
- Improves the Sales Experience for Customers: Companies can create personalized content based on the needs and preferences of each lead.
3 Types of Lead Scoring Models
There are 3 types of lead scoring models that are used by marketers.
- Demographic Model: This is a standard model that helps weed out outliers from your sales team’s list.
- Online Behaviour Model: This model takes into account which leads converted and which path did they take to convert.
- Engagement Model: This model focuses on how prospects engage with your organisation or brand.
Creating a Lead Scoring Model
A well-designed lead scoring model will allow you to assign points to each interaction the prospect has with your organisation.
By doing so, you will be able to understand which lead will convert and which won’t, saving you a lot of time, effort and resources.
In addition, lead scoring helps you determine the buying cycle stage of your prospects. Here’s how you can create a lead scoring model for your organisation:
#1. Develop Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are representations of different groups within your target audience. Every business has a few buyer personas which make it important to understand what kind of people are interested in buying the product and how to convince them.
To develop a buyer persona, segment the customers into different groups based on common features or attributes before creating a lead score.
Analyze the demographics such as seniority, job title, company size, age, gender and location of all the leads to draw out a clear outline of the characteristics that correspond with conversions.
For instance, the buyer persona of Business to Customer (B2C) of a cosmetics company would contain:
Name: Stella Ahern
Age: 38
Location: New York
Specific objectives: Reduce fine lines and shrink enlarged pores
Main problems: Have sensitive skin
Job title: Director
#2. Examine Lead’s Online Behaviour
Once you have analyzed the demographics, it’s important to understand the prospects online behaviour.
Here, behaviour refers to how the lead engages or interacts with your business. It ultimately documents what platforms or content influenced their decision to buy the product.
Behavioural touchpoints such as which platforms they visited and for how long will help you understand how your conversion rate is affected.
For instance, how many times did Stella visit your website? Which products did she view? Did she send you an inquiry or added a specific product to her cart?
#3. Assign Scoring Features
Behaviour and demographics are the primary data points in establishing the lead score.
Therefore, it’s necessary to determine which activity and attribute align with higher conversions.
This will help you understand which attribute to assign the highest value and so on.
If the feature is more connected with a conversion, assign it a higher value and vice versa.
The best way to do this is by analysing your website analytics and marketing strategies.
Additionally, you can create an attribution report to understand which content or marketing strategies influence your sales funnel.
#4. Determine Score Values
After analysing behaviours, attributes and other features, it’s time to determine the values for each.
Each type of touchpoint or demographic will need to be assigned a specific value point to refer to the lead’s score.
By doing this, the predetermined formula will automatically calculate the score for all your leads.
For instance, score values for this cosmetics company could be:
- Liking the product post on Instagram (+5 points)
- Downloading the free beauty guide (+10 points)
- Reading the newsletter (+5 points)
- Participating in the website giveaway (+15 points)
- Abandoning her cart (-5points)
5 Examples of Lead Scoring Models
The following lead scoring models are easy to implement and are extremely efficient. Go through the five examples of lead scoring models to understand which would be the best for your organisation.
#1. Hubspot Lead Scoring
It’s an automated predictive model that uses machine learning to classify and sort a large amount of data to find your highest-quality leads.
The system can optimize and update its lead scoring process over a period of time helping you save your energy and time.
This amazing tool enables you to tailor how you score the leads to make sure that your system works optimally.
Here are some other features of this model:
- Create a different scoresheet for a different lead or audience
- Create up to 25 models to cater to all your business’s needs
- Is easy to use and implement
- Has excellent customer support
#2. Business2Community
It’s one of the simplest examples of leading scoring for B2B businesses.
The type of company, company size, department and job position are the four factors that determine the matrix. Every answer has four possible scores.
Here’s how you can assign points:
- Maximum points: for the best answer
- 2nd level points: for the 2nd best answer
- 3rd level points: for 3rd best answer
- Negative points: for a negative answer
Once points have been assigned, you need to combine all the additional factors to obtain the total score for every lead.
#3. Silverpop
Their system is quite popular as it contains 16 different combinations of suitability and interest. Their final classification system has the following four categories:
- Sales qualified leads
- Leads qualified for demand generation action
- Marketing qualified leads
- Dead leads
#4. Juan Merodio
They have a lead scoring matrix that is based on a total of two scores:
- FIT score
- PAIN score
The FIT score depicts how close your prospect is to your organisation’s ideal client or buyer persona.
However, the PAIN score depicts the intensity of the pain point or problem the prospect is facing. A score of 9 means the prospect has no problem or pain. Whereas, a score of 10 means the prospect has a problem that requires immediate resolution.
The total lead score is the addition of the FIT and PAIN scores.
Once you have the total score, you can categorize the leads into groups (hot, warm or cold) or if they need more sales activity or marketing.
#5. Lead Pilot
It’s an inbound marketing tool used by financial advisors that have their own integrated lead scoring tool.
Each lead is assigned a score ranging between 1 to 100. This score keeps changing or getting updated in real-time with the changes in the prospect’s actions.
A lead is said to be qualified if it has a higher score.
Their algorithm takes into account everything including which actions they took on the website, how they interacted with the content, the time they spent on your website and more.
Artificial Intelligence is used to quantify leads. However, you can also adjust the scores according to your own lead scoring model.
How to Reduce Negative Lead Scoring
The best way to reduce negative lead scoring is to understand why the prospect is creating the distance between themselves and your organisation.
Here are a few activities that generally indicate a negative score. Improving these touchpoints is a great way to reduce negative lead scoring:
- Leaving poor or negative reviews about your products or organisation on third-party websites
- Complaints or negative comments on the organisation’s channels
- Unfollowing on social media
- Unsubscribing from email lists
- Requesting not be contacted by your organisation anymore
- Reporting your organisation’s posts, communication or emails as spam
In Conclusion
Lead scoring can sound complicated but it’s not. Once you have a lead scoring system in place, your entire organisation will become more efficient and productive.
In fact, companies that use lead scoring systems have experienced a whopping 77% increase in lead generation ROI.
Stop wondering what leads to focus on and which to discard. Stop sending unqualified leads to your sales team.
Instead, implement a solid lead scoring strategy that will help you boost revenue and grow your business!
