Every sales team always hopes for an efficient sales process. It means higher win rates and faster, smoother selling process.
To achieve this, we’re often told that it’s important to qualify leads. This way, we are not pursuing low-quality leads. We are more efficient pursuing the high-quality leads.
But how do you determine the high quality leads from the low-quality ones? Enter lead scoring.
What is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring is a scoring system wherein leads or prospects are assigned values (essentially points or scores). The values or scores, from a scale of 0 to 100, are based on a lead scoring model determined by the organization or business. The lead scoring model usually has these two basic components (or criteria):
- Demographics
- Engagement / Activity
What demographics and engagement / activity information would you need to build your lead scoring model?
Demographic Information
For B2B companies, critical demographic details include company size, industry or vertical, position or title (of contact person), revenue, budget, and other relevant company information. B2C companies normally look at age, gender, location, income, etc.
The closer the demographic details of a lead are to your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), the higher its lead score will be.
Engagement / Activity
The lead’s level of engagement or activity is also a good criterion for scoring. It shows just how invested they are. Someone who’s had more interactions with your company is obviously a lead that has better potential of converting into a customer compared to someone who just seems to be casually visiting or hovering around your site.
Engagement could mean online behavior or how they’ve interacted with you on your website and/or social media channels. Look at the website pages they’ve visited and how many times they’ve visited. What lead magnets did they download? Did they ask for a free demo or trial? Are they actively perusing your blog? Have they opted in to receive emails from your brand?
Have they liked your Facebook or Linkedin posts? Have they retweeted you or shared your posts? Did they ask to connect with you? These website and social media activities indicate a lead’s strong interest in your brand and they should merit high scores.
The other engagement you’d want to consider is more direct: their engagement with you. Have they initiated an inquiry via email or phone call, for example? This, again, is a strong indication of interest.
It’s important that you score leads based on both components, and not just one. That way, you gain a better picture of a lead’s potential for conversion.
Why Do You Need Lead Scoring?
If properly set up and successfully implemented, lead scoring can yield many benefits for your organization, among them:
- A more efficient selling process: Sales representatives prioritize the prospects with the higher (or the highest) potential to convert into customers. That helps maximize time and resources and boosts overall team efficiency.
- A more strategic sales and marketing alignment: With the two departments now following the same lead scoring model / system, there are no gray areas when qualifying leads. The whole lead qualifying process becomes more coherent and cohesive.
- A more profitable process: The whole system—a more efficient lead qualifying process and prioritizing high quality leads first—helps lower a company’s customer acquisition cost (CAC). This has a direct effect on the bottom line.
Will Your Company Benefit from Lead Scoring?
Does your company need lead scoring? Ask yourself these questions:
- Do you have a long list of potential sales leads and don’t know who to approach first?
- Perform a sales funnel analysis. In any given month (or week or quarter), do you find that you have more leads that dropped off in the sales process?
- Does your sales pipeline need some improvement? Can it be made more efficient?
If you answered yes to all, then your company would definitely benefit from a lead scoring system.
In some instances, lead scoring can be a waste of time (for now) if:
- Your sales team doesn’t have enough leads. Why bother prioritizing when you don’t have enough leads to begin with?
- Marketing and Sales are not aligned on their goals. You have bigger problems than lead scoring. Make sure to address these internal issues first.
- You don’t have enough demographic data and lead intelligence to back up your scoring. For this we recommend that you begin building intelligent sales data using a CRM.
Okay, so you’ve identified that yes, you do need a lead scoring model for your team. How do you begin to build one? That’s in our next post.
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