As your marketing efforts succeed and potential customers start showing interest, you’ll need a system to prioritize which leads are most promising to pursue. This is where lead-scoring best practices come in handy.
Lead scoring involves assigning numerical values to leads based on their qualities and behaviors. This ranks the leads from most likely to least likely to actually make a purchase, using the information you’ve gathered about them. Scoring leads this way allows you to focus your sales efforts strategically. You can devote more nurturing to the highest-scored leads while checking in less frequently with lower-scoring ones.
By following lead scoring best practices, you ensure your resources are allocated efficiently toward the leads with the greatest potential to convert into paying customers. The scoring criteria lets you determine which leads need more cultivation versus which are better left for the time being
Why is lead Scoring Important?
Lead scoring is an essential tool for businesses to identify and focus on their most promising potential customers. It’s based on the well-known 80/20 rule, which states that 80% of results come from 20% of causes. In business terms, this means that 80% of a company’s revenue often comes from just 20% of its customers.
A good lead scoring system allows you to recognize that 20% of leads are most likely to become valuable customers. By scoring leads based on their attributes and behavior, you can prioritize your sales and marketing efforts on the prospects that are most interested and qualified. This saves time and resources that would otherwise be wasted on less promising leads.
The key benefits of effective lead-scoring best practices include the:
- Identify the hottest leads to focus on immediately
- Nurture the warm leads until they are sales-ready
- Deprioritize the poor-fit leads unlikely to buy
With lead scoring, your teams can be laser-focused on the right targets at the right time. They’ll know which leads deserve more attention and resources versus which ones can be lower priority for now. Many businesses miss out by not taking advantage of this critical prioritization system.
What is lead segmentation?
Lead segmentation is similar to dividing a market into smaller groups. It means putting the leads in your database into different lists or categories.
You don’t just group leads based on their common needs. You also categorize them by shared traits like interests, job roles, age, location, and more. Segmenting leads is important because it allows you to target specific groups of customers very precisely.
While lead scoring ranks leads by how sales-ready they are, segmentation organizes them into buckets where you can take tailored actions. The two practices work together to focus your sales and marketing efforts.
For example, you may have one segment of leads interested in your enterprise software and another segment interested in your consumer apps. With segmentation, you can deploy highly relevant messaging and strategies to convert each group effectively.
Segmentation is one of the lead-scoring best practices. Dividing up your leads strategically allows you to give each segment the right level of nurturing for their needs and interests. It prevents a one-size-fits-all approach that misses the mark.
7 Ways To Implement A Lead Scoring System
Prioritizing your hottest leads is crucial for sales success. But manually qualifying each prospect is incredibly time-consuming. That’s where a lead scoring system comes in. By automatically ranking leads based on their engagement and fit, you can focus your efforts on the prospects most likely to convert.
Implementing lead scoring is one of the top lead-scoring best practices for boosting sales efficiency and ROI. But getting it up and running can feel daunting if you’ve never done it before. Follow these 7 straightforward steps to roll out an effective lead scoring system at your business:
1. Align marketing and sales
First, your marketing and sales teams need to get on the same page about what defines a qualified lead. Discuss the attributes and actions that signal a lead is a good fit and ready to buy. These shared lead scoring criteria will shape your system.
2. Identify scoring attributes
Based on your criteria, list out all the explicit lead traits and implicit behavioral cues that indicate a hot or cold lead. Explicit attributes may include job title, company size, budget, etc. Implicit cues cover actions like email opens, website visits, content downloads, and more.
3. Assign point values
Give each attribute and behavior a numeric point value reflecting its impact. More valuable traits/actions get higher scores. For instance, a marketing manager role at a Fortune 500 company could net 25 points, while a webinar attendee may earn 15 points.
4. Set scoring thresholds
Determine score ranges that bucket leads into A, B, and C categories representing how sales-qualified they are. Top-tier “A” leads might need 75+ points and go straight to sales. Lower scorers may need more nurturing from marketing first.
5. Choose a scoring tool
There are many marketing automation and CRM solutions with built-in lead-scoring capabilities to automate the scoring process for you. Shortlist tools that integrate with your existing sales stack and meet your needs.
6. Implement and test
Once you’ve configured your point values and thresholds in your chosen tool, run some test leads through the system. Adjust the settings as needed until the scores align well with your sales team’s qualified lead definition.
7. Train your teams
Don’t just flip the switch on lead scoring. Make sure marketing and sales fully understand how the new system works, how to interpret scores, and their respective roles in working leads within each tier appropriately.
Rolling out an automated lead scoring system eliminates subjective qualification efforts and aligns both teams on precisely which leads deserve the most attention. Follow these 7 simple steps, and you’ll be up and running in no time, boosting conversions while saving sales huge amounts of time and effort.
Conclusion
A lead-scoring best practice is a game-changer for efficient lead management. By automatically ranking prospects, you can quickly identify the hottest leads to prioritize. With sales and marketing aligned on scoring criteria, your teams can laser-focus on the right prospects at the right time. Implement lead scoring the right way, and you’ll boost sales productivity and ROI.