Lead Scoring – Definition Method For Your Marketing Scoring

Lead scoring is essential in an excellent inbound marketing strategy. Its use will allow you to classify your leads throughout your marketing funnel. Indeed, to be successful in your inbound marketing, you have to set up effective lead nurturing, which will help you assess your leads’ engagement. Lead scoring should allow you to automatically bring out the most engaged leads, those who have every chance of becoming customers.

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring automatically assigns a score to each of your leads based on the actions they take and their characteristics. This rating is possible thanks to upstream definitions of several criteria, which are called demographic and behavioral scoring.

The goal is to answer fundamental questions so that marketing and sales actions can work adequately together: Who are my prospects? What are their interactions with my business? Can they become a customer of my business?

Once you have answered these questions, you can classify your leads by maturity and take the appropriate actions to turn them into customers or avoid wasting time with individuals who do not align with your target.

Knowing where a lead is in your sales funnel helps sales reps and marketers use their time and resources wisely. This lead-scoring method is an essential element of marketing automation, automatically allocating more points to a prospect who is engaged and attracted to your offer.

Lead scoring will help you automatically manage many leads, avoid poor-quality prospects, and optimize your marketing actions.

The Interest Of Lead Scoring

Lead scoring will allow you to segment your contacts based on their level of maturity in your marketing funnel. To identify progress, points are automatically awarded according to pre-established rules. This rating may therefore vary depending on:

• The characteristics of the prospect and the level of knowledge you will have about him: motivations, demographic data, social information, etc …
• The prospect takes action: visits several vital pages, searches for specific terms, clicks a particular link, etc.
• The prospect’s commitment to your business: downloading, registering, making contact, following up on social networks, etc.

All these criteria should be defined based on your business area and the amount of personal information you have on your leads. Obviously, the higher the score, the more likely your lead is to be seen as a potential buyer. Conversely, you can put the prospect in question aside if the rating is low.

With this system, you can determine which of your prospects are ready and can be passed along to salespeople effortlessly. As said before, none of this is possible without a concrete marketing and sales combo. In addition to creating an effective lead scoring strategy, you will be better able to optimize your sales and marketing processes by involving both sales and marketing on an equal footing.

You will be able to process your contacts more easily and quickly!

Also Read: Best Lead Scoring Tools

An Example of Lead Scoring

To illustrate all this a bit, here is a simple and basic example of lead scoring. Every time a visitor comes to your website, you get valuable information. It can be used to create a lead scoring system. Then distribute points for each action performed, such as:

• + 3 points to leads who have viewed one of your blog posts;
• + 5 points to leads in the same sector as your persona ;
• + 10 points for leads who download one of your lead magnets ;
• + 20 points for your leads having the typical profile of your customers;

As you can see, points are awarded for the actions carried out (downloading and reading an article) and for the person’s characteristics (sector of activity and profile).

In the opposite case, where a prospect leaves you only irrelevant information, such as a false email address, or that he rarely consults your articles, or that his industry does not correspond to you, you can withdraw the points of his grade.

This way, you can see at what point in the buying cycle your prospects are, which will help you organize your actions for the individuals you want to target.

What are the Advantages of a Lead Scoring Strategy?

Although lead scoring is somewhat off-putting to implement, it offers many advantages, whether for large companies with well-defined marketing and trade centers or for SMEs. But not only! Time is a precious resource for any business, and you have to know how to spend it wisely. 79 % marketing prospects never turn into customers. (source Hubspot )

If this figure seems absurd to you, it is nevertheless genuine. And why is it difficult to turn prospects into customers? Because our time is badly distributed, our efforts are not used wisely, and marketing and sales are not aligned… All of these reasons demonstrate that implementing lead scoring is important.

Save Time By Automatically Processing Leads

The lead scoring system will help you quickly identify qualified leads and those who are not. The goal for you is not to waste time on profiles that are not or not very interested in your offer, but to focus your efforts on those attracted to your business and what you have to offer. It’s up to you to work on your strategy!

And who says saving time, says saving money! Lead scoring will unconsciously contribute to the excellent performance of your income by reducing marketing and acquisition costs by analyzing what works, for whom it works, or, on the contrary, what does not.

Increase Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rates

Prospects are not all the same, nor do they deserve the same attention. With lead scoring, you categorize your prospects based on their level of maturity in the marketing funnel. This will help you know which ones need to be addressed by the sales team and lead-nurturing campaigns.

Lead scoring helps you move your leads along the buying journey and increase their maturity. This allows you to focus your efforts only on those who score high enough to convert into customers.

Standardize Sales and Marketing with Lead Scoring

The marketing and sales teams must collaborate and align their processes for a lead scoring strategy to work. The marketing team must generate and provide qualified leads to the sales representatives, who will report the events that are happening in the field, to be able to adjust the scoring system.

The marketing team identifies the “hot” prospects, and the sales representatives can then judge their interest. We will then discuss MQL (qualified lead) for marketing and SQL (qualified lead) for sales. To find out more, it’s right here.

To remember: using both lead scoring, marketing automation, and lead nurturing, you will manage to launch more effective and relevant campaigns.

How do I Assign a Score to a Lead?

In lead scoring, you can assign marks based on characteristics (business sector, geographic area, type of position, etc.) or behavior (downloading a document, time spent on the website, requesting a demo, etc) of prospects.

These criteria should be defined based on your company’s sector and the knowledge available to you, informed by your buyers’ personas. Ratings can be positive or negative.

Socio-Demographic Characteristics

If you target a segment of the population precisely, you must collect demographic information through a form, for example, to verify that your prospects are part of your target. And if not, deduct points from those that do not correspond to your business.

You can also target your prospects according to the company (size, sector of activity, B2C or B2B, etc.) and collect the information that will be helpful to you to grant or remove points.

Online Behavior

The actions visitors take on your website provide you with valuable insights into their purchase intentions. You can analyze downloads, the types and number of pages viewed, the forms filled out, etc. These elements will allow you to award points or not.

You’ll also need to look at your open and click-through rates to collect data about your prospects’ email engagement. Social media engagement can also be a good indicator.

These criteria ensure that the score you give your prospects reflects the likelihood they will buy into your business. It is up to you to define the criteria that will be important. You may consider that a “gmail.com” address does not qualify a prospect and remove 3 points from their rating. But you can also estimate that a person working in the same sector as you deserves five additional points.

How to Succeed in Your Lead Scoring Strategy?

Define your personas and scoring criteria; the first step is to define your personas to gain a clear understanding of your target audience and the characteristics of your typical customers. You will thus know whether a prospect is a good fit for your product and/or service.

But that’s not all! You should also choose and list the behaviors and criteria to note, those you think are essential, and that will tell you whether or not a prospect is ready to be taken on by the sales team.

Mentioned a little earlier in the article, this is where we talk about behavioral scoring (example: subscribe to the newsletter, download a white paper, visit a web page, fill out a form, etc.) and demographic scoring (e.g., geographical location, profession, sex, etc).

Your personas must set these criteria. Do not hesitate to adjust them as you go and with feedback from salespeople. You can also use Google Analytics to identify the actions of your prospects.

Don’t forget to identify negative behaviors that indicate a lack of interest or disengagement among your prospects.

Also Read: Best Cross-Channel Marketing Tools

Understand the Customer Journey for their Lead Scoring

To set up an effective lead scoring strategy, you also need to understand your customers’ journey. To do this, use the data you already have. This is an important step because a prospect who is not mature enough will not be willing to make an appointment, for example. We generally distinguish:

• So-called “hot” leads: they are ready to buy your offer or need a little help to make their buying decision (example: free trial)
• So-called “cold” leads: they still need to be convinced. This is where your content marketing strategy will prove its worth by feeding your prospects content that speaks to them and addresses their problems.
• So-called “dead” leads cannot be converted because they are outside your target. They usually visit your site but do not intend to buy.
  By understanding your prospect’s journey, you will know how to help them move forward and, on the other hand, how to award points based on their level of maturity in the customer journey.

Determine the Rating Scale for Your Lead Scoring

Once you have your target, background, and associated content in mind, you can create the scoring scale that best suits you. For example :

• If your prospect is still in the research phase and downloads a template or reads one of your articles, you could award them 5 points.
• If they attend an event, such as a webinar, you can add 10 points to their account.
• And if he asks for a demonstration of your offer, you can offer him 20 points.

Each time your prospect advances in his journey and takes a higher step, do not hesitate to add more points. Once you feel your prospect is “hot” enough, you can send them to the sales team.

This process will always remain the same: prospects have a problem to solve. For this, they look for solutions and try to form an opinion to choose. To succeed in converting, you must focus on your target and provide them with the appropriate content to help them decide.

Find the Right Tools and Software for Your Lead Scoring

There is marketing automation software for managing your leads and your lead scoring strategy. These tools will save you time by automatically performing repetitive, daily tasks based on your criteria.

All your contact information will be centralized to facilitate the work of your sales and marketing teams, who can rely on it. Many CRMs are available.

You will work on your strategies and find potential customers quickly. It will also be easier to sort and clean your contact data.

Also Read: Funny Wifi Names – 50+ Funniest Wifi Network Names

Analyze and Adjust Your Lead Scoring

There is no guarantee that your lead scoring system will work the way you want it to. You should regularly analyze your process to see if it is effective and optimize it when needed. You need to be able to adapt to changes.

Your business, personas, market, and data will constantly evolve. This is why you need to keep an eye on your strategy

You will then be able to determine which of your prospects are mature enough in your funnel and take the necessary actions to close as many sales as possible.