How to Implement an Effective Lead Scoring Sales System
What is Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is a methodology that is shared between both Marketing and Sales that determines a lead’s sales-readiness. The process ultimately creates a list of leads that are compared and ranked based on which are most ready to purchase, also known as the “hottest leads”. The rank is assessed by the Marketing team and, when appropriate, turned over to the Sales team to engage the lead. Walk away from this article with at least this one action item: Rate each prospect A, B, or C for better segmenting in the way they are given attention.
The basics of lead scoring compares explicit and implicit information, as well as active and latent behavior. Explicit data refers to the information about the physical company you are prospecting, and can be broken down into two categories: firmographic and demographic. Firmographic information consists of the company’s location, the industry they are in, the number of employees they have, and other things about the company. Demographic information measures how the prospect fits your targeted audience by investigating specific job title or role, purchasing power, and the years of experience. On the other hand, and according to Nurture, implicit information analyzes the behavior of your prospects. This can be extracted through their actions, so if your prospect has registered for a webinar or your newsletter, it shows they may be interested. If your prospect has unsubscribed from your email, however, that would show they are not interested.
The other measure of active versus latent behavior simply measures how “hot” a lead is. If the lead is active, it means they are more sales-ready. This can be determined through the lead visiting certain pages on your website or contacting about quote requests. If the lead is latent, it means that they may have shown interest in your company or content, but they are not necessarily showing strong signs of intent to purchase or product interest. Some examples of this behavior are just opening an email or downloading an eBook.
Why is Lead Scoring Important?
According to a webinar workshop from Act-On, “You could have tons of leads, but failing to prioritize these leads based on trackable intent metrics wastes valuable time and resources while also causing you to miss out on the best opportunities. Lead scoring enables your Marketing and Sales teams to prioritize and identify which individuals are primed for outreach and which ones require more nurturing.” Your prospect interactions will uncover details, such as pain-points and interests, as well as ability to purchase, that will help your team score the lead and warm up future outreach.
4 Steps to Build Your Lead Scoring Program
The simple, yet highly efficient steps to building your lead scoring program consist of:
- Defining your ideal buyer profile
- Assigning points to profile criteria
- Identifying behaviors indicating interest
- Assigning points to behavioral criteria
Defining Your Ideal Buyer Profile
In the first step, you want to analyze the components of your target audience to create a general buyer profile. To conduct this, the best way is to run reports through your CRM (customer relationship management) database to find patterns that identify your greatest customer profile and targets. This information is explicit as it often contains data describing the physical company, such as geolocation, annual company revenue, industry, title of the decision-maker, spending opportunity, etc.
Assigning Points to Profile Criteria
The second step is crucial to the entire process as it establishes a qualifying point system used to assess and order customer profiles. In order to do this, create categories for differing data elements with matching point ranges. A common strategy is using a 50–point system where a “50” indicates the lead is sales-ready. Below 50, however, there are categories with different point ranges that correspond with how sales-ready the prospect is. For example, 16-49 might suggest the lead is almost ready to be pursued by your Sales team but is missing one component before being turned over. If the lead is between 1-4, that would suggest they are just beginning to become influenced, and still need much more work before direct outreach happens.
When using this strategy, the profiles are automatically ranked where the higher the point value ascribed to them, the “hotter” they are and the more urgent it is to reach out to them sooner. Assigning points makes lead scoring easier, more uniform, and will exponentially benefit your results.
Identifying Behaviors Indicating Interest
This step utilizes the active versus latent behavior analysis to identify which actions prospects are taking towards your company’s products and/or services. Any action at all, no matter how minimal or nonchalant it may be, should be noted. Some examples of these actions are opening a specific email, submitting a form, opening a specific page on your website, attending a webinar, etc.
Assigning Points to Behavioral Criteria
Much like the second step, this step utilizes the information extracted from the analysis of the behaviors indicating interest and implements them into the categorical system. It is important to note that behaviors and actions display different levels of interest, therefore, actions that show high levels of interest would be assigned to the higher end of your scoring scale. Altogether, these categories are compared to the categories of qualifying information to further the analysis of your leads.
Conclusion
If assigning points seems too complicated for the marketing & sales team right now, consider assigning a letter ranking (A, B, C) and define what each one represents. While a bit more unrefined, it will still bring your company on a path towards assigning a larger budget (both time and money) towards nurturing those “A” rated prospects. A successful lead scoring program creates uniformity between the Marketing team and Sales team to optimize the efficiency of engaging leads appropriately. Here at MarketReach, we score our client’s leads to ensure we are providing our clients with closable sales opportunities. We maintain and stand by the quality of our leads by analyzing them in an efficient, standardized method to provide clients with the most value. We also reward our call team with highly-ranked lead presentations. MarketReach keeps the staff at the top of their game!
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