Not all leads are created equal. Find out how to prioritize yours to win more sales.
Whether you are a business owner, marketing pro, or entrepreneur, acquiring new customers is essential to the growth and success of your company. However, not all leads are created equally – some have a higher likelihood of converting into paying customers than others. Enter lead scoring.
By monitoring the customer lifecycle from beginning to end and ranking prospective buyers based on critical actions taken, businesses and sales teams can avoid chasing dead-end leads and focus their efforts on those most likely to convert into paying customers. Salespositive™, Entrepositive’s soon-to-launch marketing automation platform, features custom lead scoring functionality that set it apart from comparable tools on the market.
Jump ahead:
What is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring is a system that allows you to identify and prioritize your most valuable leads by ranking them based on behavioral and demographic information, like job title, industry, or time spent on the company website. Lead scoring is a critical part of the lead nurturing process.
For example, you might assign a lead 5 points for downloading a whitepaper and 10 points for requesting a demo. C-level executives might be assigned 10 points, while managers are assigned 5 points. Identifying and quantifying the key criteria that suggest a lead will be more likely to convert is critical to the lead scoring process. Going through these steps will help you identify the most promising leads in your target market, allowing you to focus your sales efforts and resources accordingly.
Translation: Your most qualified leads earn the most points.
Analytics play a critical role in lead scoring by providing valuable insights into the behavior and actions of potential customers. These key behaviors are critical for successful lead scoring initiatives. If a prospective customer goes an extra step for example, indicating greater level of interest than just a page view and has a longer-than-average session duration, your sales team should be focused more on this promising opportunity, than any random pick from your cold leads.
Establishing Thresholds
Once you start scoring leads based on engagements and analytics, the next step is to determine how to act on these scores. For example, when a lead earns 250 points, that lead is released into the CRM. If a lead’s score is higher than 50, they may be qualified for a sales follow-up, while lower-priority leads can be nurtured through automated touchpoints. By setting a points threshold, you can indicate when a lead is ready to be passed to the sales team for more targeted outreach.
If you find that your highest-scoring leads are not converting using your designated scoring system, you may have to adjust your ranking criteria, sales approach, product offering or any combination of these. This continuous iteration and improvement will result in an improved, more efficient and more effective sales pipeline.
Benefits of Lead Scoring
Engaged customers buy more. But what metrics do you use to distinguish those customers from all your other leads? Lead scoring can help businesses tailor their upselling strategies to individual customers based on their behavior and preferences, leading to higher success rates and improved customer satisfaction.
Other benefits include greater sales process efficiency, increased conversion rates, increased retention rate, reduced customer acquisition cost, and ultimately more revenue for your business. By focusing on the leads with the highest scores, you’ll spend your time and resources where they have the greatest impact.
Lead scoring can also be useful in evaluating referred leads, allowing businesses to track the effectiveness of their referral programs and analyze referral data to identify high quality referral sources.
Optimize Lead Scoring with Salespositive™
Marketing automation software like Salespositive™ can make lead scoring easy. By automatically assigning lead scores based on lead-triggered engagements, businesses now have an integrated way to prioritize and rank their leads, eliminating a need for manual lead scoring.
While a range of marketing automation solutions exist, Salespositive™ stands apart with its completely custom lead scoring features. Designed with automation first in mind, Salespositive™ allows its users to create organization-wide rules for lead scoring, as well as attribute points individually throughout campaigns. The same is true for the inverse, threshold-triggered events. (More on that in our coming Lead Scoring Guide.)
Unique to the Salespositive™ anonymous tracking capability, points can even be attributed to a lead before they are a known contact.
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