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Finding leads can be a challenge - even more so when you are trying to qualify high-potential leads that will likely convert. In fact, generating hot leads is one of the top challenges marketers face today.
More often than not, sales teams spend their time trying to nurture poor leads instead of leads that hold high-conversion capacity.
Maybe your lead qualifying cycle is too long or ambiguous, or perhaps you are getting conversions but don't know which sales prospects to prioritize - it all comes down to lead scoring. So it is essential to know what is lead scoring and why it is important.
Lead scoring is a method to classify and qualify leads based on their probability of conversion. It is mainly performed by assigning numerical values to prospects, thereby helping marketers in identifying which leads are most likely to convert.
Lead scoring can streamline and reduce the conversion timeline for sales teams. They can now pay attention to the right people, close more deals, and understand the hierarchy of leads they are receiving.
The process takes several factors into account. For instance, some of the components that can affect a lead score are -
Tracking user behavior on your website can be another key indicator in identifying a hot lead. A visitor who compares product prices is a stronger lead and will have a higher lead score than a visitor who browses reading resources on your site.
Understanding the different parameters that affect conversion is a focus determinant for effective lead scoring.
Lead scoring aims to make the job easier for marketers and sales teams. Prior customer data can be used to form impactful lead scoring strategies that can accelerate the conversion cycle for sales teams. Let's understand why it is important:
Manually processing leads is not only time-consuming, but it also opens up room for human error. Using an automated lead scoring system can simplify the evaluation as the leads are now ranked using a pre-determined criterion.
Lead scoring can help you assign your prospects according to different aspects like their past interactions with your brand. By understanding your user's pain points and how well you can cater to them, your sales teams can foster better professional relationships and accelerate the time to close.
Not all visitors on your website are looking to make a purchase right away. It is important to know which stage of the sales cycle a prospect is on. For instance, you might lose out on revenue because you bombard a potential customer with sales pitches when they are just in the exploration stage. Lead scoring can help you avoid such a mismatch.
With the help of scored leads, you can find out which sales prospects are genuinely interested in converting at the earliest. With automated lead screening, sales teams can focus on primary opportunities first.
Marketers do their job so that salespersons can onboard more clients. With manual lead scavenging, the operational bridge between marketing and sales teams can widen. Lead scoring not only provides you with better leads but also ensures synergy between the two teams in a company.
Read more: Top 20 Sales KPI for SaaS growth teams to track in 2022
Lead scoring is often touted as a great way to make your cold calls more effective. How often does your sales team call a prospect, only to learn they were not ready to convert yet?
Here are the lead scoring steps you can follow to build a powerful tool:
The most important part of scoring leads is researching your target audience and identifying what makes the ideal lead.
You must consider two primary factors that go into making the ideal lead:
First, identify key points such as age group, industry, location, and behavior on your website. Then, use this data to create a profile of your ideal lead to give you a picture of who is most likely to convert and become a customer.
Based on all the research you have compiled, you can choose a scale of 10 or 100. The goal is to make the scale as balanced as possible so that you get a realistic score for each lead, allowing your sales team to filter through them better.
There can be positive and negative criteria:
Now that you know which factors make a good lead, you can distribute the points fairly among the criteria. For this, you can calculate your overall lead-to-customer conversion rate. Identify criteria that contributed the most and least to closing a deal and assign points to each of them accordingly.
For instance, you may find that leads who signed up for your newsletter are more likely to convert into customers than leads who looked through your Careers page.
Having made a scale to score your leads, you can now set the threshold to determine which prospects should be called. Not every person will fit the bill of the ideal lead, so setting a threshold is important to make your scoring effective.
Note that this part of the process gets better with refinement. You could list circumstances that led to successful leads converting and add those points to figure out roughly how high your threshold to be. You can refine this with feedback from your sales team.
Your lead scoring tool is now ready for action, but it’s not perfect yet.
Your tool must be refined over time to be more efficient. Be flexible and open to changing scoring criteria and the weightage of points assigned. Make any changes that might be required and configure your tool to identify prospects on your website.
You have now come up with your own lead scoring tool to help you filter out the noise and only call prospective customers that are most likely to convert. This will help save your sales team precious time by prioritizing on the right group of leads.
Krishna is dedicated to helping brands and startups grow through user-centric product design that helps them get the most out of their data. He acts as a conduit, understanding what customers need and then creating products that meet those needs. He is a nature enthusiast and has fondness for great music and movies.
