So you want to start Lead Scoring….
You have prioritized generating inbound leads to increase revenue, grow your business, and continuously bring new potential customers into your sales funnel but now what…
In comes, lead scoring. Lead scoring is the process of assigning values or points to each lead you generate for your business. You can score your leads by a variety of attributes including how often they engage with your website, fill out a form for gated content, open an email, job title, and more. Lead scoring helps marketing and sales prioritize leads and determine the likeliness that those leads will become customers. Lead scoring is an important part of any successful, well-rounded lead generation marketing campaign. According to a survey done by DemandGen Report, 41% of respondents saw improved conversion rates among leads using lead scoring.
Here are five steps to get you started when considering Lead Scoring:
- Confirm you have a Marketing Automation and CRM systems integrated for Lead Scoring.
Marketing Automation systems track and score all lead behaviors made by leads. If you also want to score leads based on demographic data, that information lives in your CRM system. It’s important to ensure that your Marketing Automation system and your CRM system are well integrated so that these platforms can share data seamlessly. Another option is to use an all-in-one solution like Hubspot or Salesforce. If you don’t have a Marketing Automation system at all, you’ll need to consider investing in one in order to lead score.
- Connect with your Sales Team and Customers.
Your sales team are the ones on the ground speaking directly with new leads and likely understand leads’ needs better than anyone else. Their insight can be invaluable to help determine what type of marketing materials you should be putting out to attract leads as well as helping determine what actions leads take that drive them closer to becoming a customer. Ask your sales team what their experiences are and how to better score your leads to help prioritize them for the sales team to make more informed calls and close more deals.
Your customers are another great group of people to connect with to understand their journey through the funnel and what actions they took before they became customers. Speak with a variety of your customers to learn what they thought was important during their journey and what they think was responsible for them becoming customers.
- Determine your Lead Scoring Attributes.
Consider what you learned from your customers, sales team, and marketing knowledge to now create the list of attributes you want to score your leads on. It’s important to not only have positive scoring but also negative scoring to best define your leads and chances of moving them down the sales funnel to ultimately become customers. Some examples of attributes to consider scoring your leads are:
Demographics
- Job title
- Geographic location
- Company size
- Industry
Actions
- Email | opens, clicks
- Website | page views, length of time on page, clicks on page
- Social media engagement
- Content downloads
- Form submissions
- Contact requests
This information will be pulled from your CRM system and your form fields on any outbound or inbound marketing forms for leads to submit. It’s important to have all forms consistent across your website and advertising assets as well as with the demographic data you’re looking to score in your Lead Scoring program.
Once you’ve selected the attributes that matter to your organization, you need to assign scores to these actions and demographics so that leads can start to move through the sales funnel. For example, if your ideal customer is someone that is a Manager or higher you could score them like this:
Job Title | Coordinator -2
Job Title | Manger +2
Job Title | Director +4
Job Title | Vice President or VP +6
- Determine Threshold and Set Up Workflows.
The point of setting up Lead Scoring is so that when leads are determined as “qualified”, sales is alerted. This lets the sales team know that this lead should be prioritized over other leads new to the system and that this lead has a higher likelihood of becoming a customer. In order to do this, you need to define a score threshold that signals sales that a lead has moved through your customer funnel to a Marketing Qualified Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Opportunity, etc. It is important to get back to these qualified leads as soon as possible as they have shown significant interest in the moments of them engaging with your business.
In order to get these qualified leads in the hands of your sales team, you can set up workflows with your Marketing Automation system. Here you can have it set up so that as soon as a lead crosses the threshold to a qualified lead, a sales team member will be immediately notified and should reach out right away.
- Evaluate your Lead Scoring.
Once you have implemented your Lead Scoring, threshold, and work flows you’ll want to revisit it regularly to monitor it’s success. Lead Scoring is not an exact science and takes time to ensure you are scoring your leads properly and not qualifying leads too early or too late. It’s important to check in with your sales team often as well to find out if they’re converting the qualified leads being sent to them. We recommend checking in with sales quarterly on this topic to make changes and better your Lead Scoring efforts.
Lead Scoring is a great tool to help determine the quality of your leads from your marketing efforts and to help your sales team prioritize their time as leads come in. The Nowspeed team are experts in setting up an effective Lead Scoring program for any organization no matter the Marketing Automation and CRM systems used. If you’re ready to get started Scoring your Leads, reach out today.
