Are you a marketer looking for ways to increase sales? Well, one way to do this is to identify sales-ready prospects. The coordinated efforts of your sales and marketing teams in generating qualified leads can assist in creating a wide customer base, thereby improving sales.
How do you identify prospects with sales readiness? Lead scoring is the answer. In this blog, we have provided insights into lead scoring and the strategies that can make it effective.
Article Breakdown
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring ranks prospects based on their characteristics, interest in the brand, and readiness to close a sale.
Leads are assigned numerical scores based on several criteria. This will help identify if they can be your potential customers. MarketingSherpa shares through its survey that with lead scoring, sales reps can have 20% more sales opportunities.
Lead scoring assists the sales team in focusing their efforts on leads who are sales-ready. A HubSpot survey states that sales reps spend nearly 15% of their time leaving voicemails and 24% of their time sending emails. The technique of lead scoring can reduce this redundancy and help improve sales.
What are some effective lead scoring strategies?
If you want to practice an effective lead-scoring technique, you should follow some strategies. Here are some tips to help you with this:
- Identify your ideal customer profile
Who is your ideal customer? The answer to this depends on the industry you are in, the size of your company, the problems of customers you wish to solve, the products/services you are into, etc.
Defining your customer profile will give proper direction to your sales activities. Your marketing strategies attract only that segment of buyers who are interested in your products/services. Therefore, it makes sense to concentrate only on that sector to generate a customer base.
- Align sales and marketing teams
Your organization’s sales and marketing teams should work in close alignment with each other. Both teams can share valuable insights about the buyer persona and devise strategies accordingly.
The sales team is in close contact with the leads and can identify the conversion statistics, and opportunities. This information is of great use to the marketing team, which can optimize the opportunities to bring in more customers.
When the teams are not aligned, it is difficult to focus on the organization’s goals. A lead scoring strategy works best with the inputs of the teams.
- Map the channels for conversion
A customer passes through various stages in the sales funnel before closing a sale. Each of these stages can be approached by the brand through various channels.
While some channels work best for some customers, they must be changed for others. For example, some brands succeed through inbound marketing, some choose email marketing, cold calling, webinars, etc. So, it is essential to map the channels that suit your business and help in easy conversion.
You will know with experience what works best for your brand. Segmenting your customers based on channels for conversion makes your task much easier.
- Assign points and develop a lead threshold score
On a scale of 0 to 100, assign points to your leads based on how close they are to being sales-ready. When the leads get a score of 100, it means they are sales-ready.
For example, assign 10 points for attending a webinar, 5 points for visiting your webpage, 10 points for clicking on a link, 10 points for downloading, etc. While these are positive attributes, there can be negative scoring too. Points are reduced when a prospect unsubscribes your email or when your email bounces. You should then calculate the cumulative scores for each lead.
When the lead reaches the threshold score, it is easy to make them your customers.
- Nurture your leads
You have successfully generated a lead in the above stages, but sustaining it for the long term is also important.
There are several ways to nurture a lead, like offering tailored content, reaching out through multiple channels, following up periodically, sending personalized emails, etc.
Nurturing techniques can help in maintaining good relationships with your prospects by improving engagement. They serve as a great way to know more about the leads. The more you know, the more opportunities to explore.
- Track MQL conversion rates
Your sales and marketing teams should track marketing qualified leads (MQL) conversion rates. The rates represent how many MQLs are turning into sales opportunities. It also is an indicator of the performance of your lead scoring strategy.
You can be satisfied if the lead scoring strategy is performing well; otherwise, you should revisit and revise the strategies.
- Revisit your lead scoring strategy
There is a need to review and revise the lead scoring strategy so that you see visible results in sales. If the result of your evaluation reveals that the leads need to be qualifying for MQLs, there may be an issue with your strategy.
The sales and marketing teams should discuss and analyze the present scoring system and identify its flaws.
Final thoughts
Lead scoring is imperative to have a focussed approach toward the prospects. You could use lead generation tools to help you with generating scores.
DemandGen survey reports that 68% of B2B organizations use lead-scoring strategies to improve their sales. Follow the tips mentioned above to join this list and scale your business smartly.