With the constant pressure on marketing departments to provide leads to sales the natural tendency is to push all leads directly to sales with little or no qualification. This type of hand-off to sales is counter productive. Wasted time calling dead leads, sales frustration, lower conversions and sales close rates…. This is where lead scoring can help.
Organisations that leverage lead scoring techniques can pinpoint prospects more effectively and thus dramatically improve conversion rates. This is a fact. If done right lead scoring will guide you your sales and marketing efforts and allow you to put your energy where you will have the best gains. Lead scoring can be applied to any business size the important thing to keep in mind is to start simple and refine your scoring as you progress.
Start Simple
During the first phase of lead scoring start by focusing on prioritizing your leads. Make sure your top leads get a top score so you can push them to the top of your calling queue giving you more chances to close the deal. The concept is simple here assign a higher score to someone who is interested in your product. I prefer to use a scale from 0-100. Its simple to understand and it works. For example, someone that has submitted a trial offer should get a higher score (score:80) then someone who has read a whitepaper (score:20) etc… Score values are arbitrary but should reflect the the quality of the lead and the action taken.
Now from there you have your sales team tackle the higher scored leads first. This way you will spend time on the highest quality leads increasing your chances to convert them to customers
More advanced lead scoring techniques
Once you have mastered basic lead scoring techniques you can move on to more refined strategies and use lead scoring to assign certain score levels to specific sales reps/teams. For example, lower scores can go to telemarketers that will further qualify the prospects while higher scored leads can go to a veteran sales rep/closer that will come in for the final closing of the deal. You should use these examples as ideas. Your scoring strategy should be based on your business needs.
At this stage, marketeers can also customize lead nurturing based on a prospect’s potential value/score. Someone with a higher score might get information regarding why they should choose your product vs. the competition where as someone with a lower sore that is still in the research phase might get general marketing information or problem solving documentation.
From there the possibilities are endless. All your marketing and sales strategy can be tailored around lead scoring and if done correctly conversions and sales will increase dramatically and you will gain on productivity as well. The important thing to remember is that the score should reflect the potential of the prospect becoming a customer. The higher the score, the higher the likelihood they should be a customer.
Marketing automation tools are very useful to easily implement lead scoring strategies. Read more on Alsamarketing automation product.
