Manage Your Sales Pipeline with Lead Scoring
More and more B2B organizations are turning to marketing automation tools to processes and streamline their business functions. Traditionally sales and marketing departments used to process lists giving names of people with title and organization name. This created a problem, as many important leads were missed out being followed up on, not knowing which lead is interested in your product or who your target buyers are.
B2B marketing automation platform provides integrated sales and marketing automation solutions for lead generation and has developed into a major phenomenon with lead scoring being an integral part of modern lead management. By tracking your prospect’s behaviors and web activity, you can determine their level of interest in your product. Only by combining both these factors you can send truly qualified leads to sales.
Lead scoring is a process that helps businesses make critical decisions. It can be defined as a technique of quantifying the value of a lead, based on prospect’s profile, behavior, demographic and likelihood to buy. This can effectively help sales managers manage their sales pipeline by optimizing their sales resource allocation. With lead scoring they can reduce initial lead generation cost and sales conversion cost.
According to Gartner “By converting segmentation criteria into business rules how leads are rated, or scored, providers see an immediate boost in lead volume and lead quality but up to 70% of sales leads are not properly leveraged or are completely ignored, thus wasting marketing program dollars.”
With Lead Scoring, the best leads always rise to the top, so the sales team knows where to focus their time. Based on lead scoring, Marketing can differentiate between leads that are sales ready and those that are not.Marketers are able to build a scoring model to rank prospects, as well as segment them based on the most appropriate messages or follow-up communication channels (e.g. phone, email, and direct mail). The overall objective of lead scoring is to make difference to conversion rates and reduce acquisition costs.
Getting Started with Lead Scoring
The best way to go about designing lead scoring is to start simple and make it iterative with inputs from the sales team, insight from the existing data and experimentation (AB testing) from Marketers. It is somewhat analogous to agile development methodology in software development.
Gather information- Start by getting together with your sales team to gather data that indicates your buyers’ interest or sales-readiness.
Determine your ideal target -Use all relevant information, including demographic and behavioral scoring, to create your target buyer profile. Think about explicit and implicit attributes and assign points based on their relevance.
Align sales and marketing objectives – Your sales team must review and approve your information and your buyer personas. Focus on the most relevant and common findings and you will soon be able to:
Using the right lead scoring rules with the right combination of implicit and explicit information about a website visitor you can determine their identity and quality. This data when accumulated over a period of time and when combined with a company level view, becomes a powerful tool in qualifying leads.
Lead Scoring makes sales more efficient by helping them focus on the hottest leads first and get to them with a relevant solution in real time.
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