The current business environment means that companies have had to cut sales targets or, in the worse case, closed their doors for good. Sales prospects are not willing, or able, to make buying decisions due to market uncertainty or they are just “kicking the tyres”. This leads to sales and marketing teams wasting resources chasing opportunities that just don’t exist.
To counter this there is one tactic that your business can employ which will help you identify true high quality business leads that will engage with your sales team and are ready to enter the sales funnel – Lead Scoring.
So what is lead scoring?
Lead scoring helps you understand and rate your prospects by scoring them based on how engaged they are with your business, how they fit with your business, their persona, and, if it is known, their current position in the buying cycle.
Each prospect is scored based on a number of criteria which can include:
Company size / industry
Job title
Location
Website clicks and user journey
Downloads
Form completion
Social following / commenting
Working together your sales and marketing team can use the score to rank leads and decide if they are ready to be closed or need additional nurturing.
Five benefits of lead scoring
Measurability – Because you are applying scores to leads based on activity you can measure how effective your marketing campaigns are. Have you provided enough high quality content? Have they followed a prescribed user journey? Are they the type of customer you want to deal with? The more points added to prospects the more effective your campaigns.
Higher MQL to SQL conversion – In general terms a marketing qualified lead (MQL) is someone has engaged with you but is not ready to buy whereas a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is one that is highly engaged and more likely to become a customer. This means that your sales pipeline is only filled with real prospects and effort is directed to convert the right ones.
Improved sales productivity – If you want a high performing sales team then they need to spend their time converting high quality SQLs into sales. By focusing their efforts on higher scoring leads they spend less time with prospects who are not yet in the sales funnel and more with those that are ready to buy which makes them more productive.
Increased marketing effectiveness – Using lead scoring your marketing team can concentrate resources and budgets on those campaigns that increase the score of prospects you want to work with and develop content marketing and inbound campaigns accordingly.
Better sales and marketing alignment – In order to be truly effective your business needs sales and marketing teams to work together. Because the marketing team use lead scoring to focus their efforts they are creating higher quality sales leads that, when they are passed to the sales team, are more likely to convert.
Getting started with lead scoring
Lead scoring compliments your existing sales and marketing processes such as B.A.N.T (budget, authority, need, and timeline for purchase) and can be a very effective way of ensuring sales and marketing resources are used effectively.
By using marketing information systems such as HubSpot, Marketo or Pardot you can automate scoring and reporting so that at a glance you know where to focus your efforts and improve business performance.
If you are looking at improving the quality of your sales leads, want to develop inbound marketing campaigns, or would just like to talk through an idea with one of our consultants call us on 01625 403199 or complete the contact form and we will get back to you.
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