Lead scoring is a great way to use real data to understand what kind of lead is going to be the most likely to turn into a sale or customer for your products or solutions (click here to go back to the basics). Is this person potentially a good fit for your product or solution based on their similarities or differences to your current customers? Are they a decision maker? Do they have a need or interest in your product or solution? Have they viewed a webinar, spent some time on your pricing page, started a free trial?
Lead scoring helps you understand and compile all of this information and presents you with a score for any given lead. You decide which demographics (age, location, role) and possible actions (visited landing page, viewed webinar, requested demo) are most important and you give them a positive points value, there can also be negative points for things that make a person less likely to purchase. The score can and will change as the lead continues to take different actions. So, what kinds of things can you do with a lead scoring system? Follow along.
You’ve used a CRM system for a couple of years now but have never done anything with all of the records, do you know you are actually sitting on a gold mine worth of data points?
Maybe you haven’t gotten around to diving into all of that data quite yet, but now is the time because you could be missing out on great leads while your salespeople spin the wheels on long-shot, cold leads. Here are a few things we recommend taking a look at as part of your deep dive:
As you understand more and more which specific data points make a purchase more likely, you can start to rank and assign them points by order of importance or relevance. Lead scoring isn’t a perfect science and you should be open to changing things both as you get it set up initially and as your company, products, and customers evolve. It’s not something you should set and leave forever.
There are many different types of leads and stages in a customer journey. Lead buckets are filled around the defining points in that journey. Lead buckets make it easy to understand which leads are high, medium, or low priority, as well as who should own next steps with the lead. This can allow you to target users with content or action relevant to their current position along the buying process, which according to Aberdeen Market Intelligence yields 72% higher conversion rates.
You can have a couple of buckets for marketing nurtured leads, one for marketing qualified ready to be passed over to sales, a couple for the different urgency levels for sales, and another bucket for those that were sent to sales and then rejected or lost. This entire process can really be as simple or complex as you want including as many or few buckets as necessary for your unique customer journey.
It’s no secret that when sales and marketing teams are aligned and work well together, everyone is happier and the results go up. Involving both teams in the lead scoring process can bring them closer together. Allow them to figure out which data points are important and work together to define and score both MQLs and a SQLs. [This process is called creating an SLA. Read about it, here.]
Understanding these important parts within the funnel first-hand will allow for clearer handoff points and better cross-team responsibility understanding. This cooperative approach provides a single source of truth so there won’t be any finger pointing or blame, the numbers will tell an accurate story of lead quality and customer journeys.
There are countless creative ways to utilize lead scoring to better understand and serve your prospects and customers.
If you have a wide range of offerings, serve multiple industries, or have widely varying price points, you can use lead scoring to define which types of leads would be the best fit for specific products or solutions.
If you have a lot of data points, it can be difficult to know which ones have more of an effect over others. You can run different iterations of your lead scoring program. Keep all but one or two points the same so you can see which results in more closed leads to create more accurate scoring moving forward. There is no limit to how many times you can do this, so it should be something you do fairly often on an ongoing basis.
One buying journey ending in a purchase is just the beginning of your customer’s overall experience with your company and product/s. Your current customers most likely don’t immediately purchase everything you have to offer meaning there may be opportunities to expand their portfolio. Lead scoring for account managers can help raise renewal rates and increase sales of additional products or solutions.