Lead Scoring Systems for Improved Marketing & Sales Performance

Lead Scoring Systems for Improved Marketing & Sales Performance

Initiating consumer interest or inquiry into a company’s goods or services is known as lead generation. A lead is often a customer’s contact information and, in some situations, demographic data of someone who has expressed interest in a particular good or service. Once companies understand how to generate leads, converting them into paying clients can sometimes feel like walking in complete darkness.

That’s where lead scoring comes into play to make this process of understanding leads, catering to them and having them convert (even multiple times) is as smooth and easy as possible.

What is lead scoring?

A lead scoring system assigns point values to different actions or characteristics a lead or customer performs throughout their customer lifecycle. 

 

For example, if someone lands on your website and signs up for your newsletter campaign, they move down your sales funnel and are probably one step closer to making a purchase or becoming a client. You’ll want to assign point values to this action as this person has become a marketing-qualified lead (MQL). Let’s say this person opens your next newsletter campaign and decides to go to your contact page to schedule a call with a sales rep. They just moved even further down your sales funnel and became a sales qualified lead (SQL).

Even if they didn’t take that action to schedule a call, a sales rep would contact them after hitting an agreed-point value threshold.

For each action a lead takes in the sales funnel, they earn a point. This method assists sales and marketing teams in prioritizing leads, handling them properly, and speeding up the conversion rate of those leads into customers. The sales and marketing departments can determine which leads may be the most valuable to the business and its current sales funnel by using the lead scoring approach. A lead scoring system can only be effective if it is set up correctly and regularly used. Otherwise, there is a chance that it will be a waste of time and money for marketing and sales.

Why lead scoring shouldn’t be done manually? 

Companies may decide to create a lead scoring system manually and in that case, they would spend a lot of time and effort on something that’s prone to change, human error and time-sensitive.

• If you have more than 1 product/service or ideal customer you will have more sales funnels to manage and that means more data to analyze.
• These are only some of the data you’ll collect and analyze: demographic information, company/prospect information, online behaviour (which pages of the website they visited, what offers they download etc.), email engagement, social engagement, spam recognition etc.
• You’ll have to regularly talk to your sales team, and existing and previous customers and go back to your analytics to understand which marketing efforts lead to conversions throughout the funnel.
• You’ll need to tweak your lead-scoring system on a regular basis to ensure it remains accurate.

 

We talked about how to perfect your lead scoring model to close sales here.

What are the benefits of implementing a lead scoring system?

1. Higher conversion rates. Only leads with a certain score or above are spoken to by sales reps. Leads with scores under are subjected to an automated nurture campaign.
2. Decreased marketing and acquisition costs. You can identify and cut on marketing efforts that don’t bring quality leads.
3. Higher revenue. On average, implementing lead scoring systems increases deal close rates by 30%, and company revenue by 18%.

Predictive Lead Scoring

To go one step further, predictive lead scoring software combines the appropriate set of lead behaviours and data points using big data and machine learning algorithms. These characteristics are then automatically compared and rated with those of new leads.
Your marketing automation tool may then be used to send your qualified leads to your team so they can begin the sales process and advance leads through your sales funnel after your scoring system is in place.

From that point, nurturing your leads till the point at which they convert is a simplified and seamless process that will increase your CRO. (Conversion Rate Optimization)

Conclusion

Revenue soars when lead scoring is implemented in a company because it establishes a constant feedback loop between the sales and marketing departments.
Lead scoring eliminates the guesswork involved in determining which leads are prepared to make a purchase (and which aren’t), saving you a lot of time.
While manually scoring leads can be a tedious and time-consuming task, adopting effective lead scoring software will enable you to find high-quality leads and revenue opportunities that are currently concealed in your database.