When the majority of individuals start employing inbound marketing, their primary concern is bringing in sufficient fresh leads into the sales pipeline. Once you have generated an abundance of leads, you need to determine who is genuinely interested in your product and who is merely browsing.
That’s where lead scoring comes in.
What is Lead Scoring
Assigning numerical values to prospects to compare and determine their relative ranking is referred to as lead scoring. The system evaluates leads by applying criteria that will give them a score that is either positive or negative based on their features and activities. For B2B companies, lead scoring is accomplished with the help of a variety of account information, as well as data points that are produced by the company itself or gathered from outside sources.
Lead scoring is employed in order to evaluate the sales capability of leads, particularly in relation to B2B sales, and assist in the progression of the purchasing process. Points can be awarded in either a positive or negative manner to leads. Points of reward are given for favorable attributes or conduct (for example, a lead coming from an identifiable industry). Negative actions are penalized (for example, unsubscribing from important emailing lists or erasing payment details).
Behavioral information is what lead scoring does best, even though job position and organization particulars are necessary for initial qualification. Why? A B2B lead won’t buy on their first visit. They would gradually become acquainted with you by consuming your material (case studies, webinars, etc.). They could also book a phone conversation, initiate a test period with no charge, or contact customer service. These engagement points would be utilized to steadily assign points to potential customers.
Who is Lead Scoring For? Is it the Right Thing for Your Business?
It is now clear what B2B lead scoring is and the process behind it, so it is time to decide if this method is suitable for your firm. The necessity of utilizing lead scoring depends on the number of leads produced and the value of each transaction. It can be an absolute requirement or just a nice additional feature. You might also not need lead scoring at all.
Lead scoring is essential for you if you:
- Process hundreds or thousands of leads per month and your sales/marketing system is being pushed to the limit.
- Have to deal with a lot of unqualified leads and waste time on them.
- Are missing out on good leads because you can’t prioritize them.
- Are you spending a significant amount of resources on leads who don’t convert?
- You want to replicate your best leads and customers and run personalized retargeting campaigns for the best leads.
If you possess any of the criteria listed, it is necessary for you to use lead scoring. If your data set is large, then both predictive and rule-based scoring can be utilized (these will be discussed further). If you don’t have a lot of data, predictive scoring won’t be as successful because it is based mostly on data.
When it comes to advertising, the more data available, the more useful lead scoring becomes. It allows you to create target audiences that closely match your top leads and customers, determine the quality of your best prospects, and display personalized content on your website, through emails, and in retargeting campaigns.
Lead scoring is good to have for you if you:
- Have a lower volume of leads to deal with.
- You deal with unqualified leads but you don’t lose out on opportunities because of it.
- You don’t miss out on good leads because your volume is low.
- You want to replicate your best leads and customers and run personalized retargeting campaigns for the best leads.
If the points below do not pertain to you, there’s no need to utilize lead scoring, though you may still benefit from doing so. The representatives you have assigned will attend to all leads that come in, however, using lead scoring will enable you to determine which leads are more important and respond to those with higher scores in a timely manner. You can customize your retargeting strategies for leads that are of greater importance and generate audiences similar to those already subscribed. The reps will be aware of the strengths of the leads provided by your grading system if these are broken down.
If you fit into this group, rule-based scoring will be functioning more productively since you have fewer data to use, and having more precise control would be more appropriate. It would be advantageous to include basic predictive scoring.
You don’t need lead scoring at all if you:
- Are you a startup or a very small business with a small number of leads generated every month?
- You have very high ticket prices (but a low volume of leads) and have a fixed selling process where you talk to all leads regardless.
If any of these scenarios are applicable to you, lead scoring likely won’t be effective.
Lead Scoring Models
Lead scoring models make certain that the rankings you assign to each potential customer is consistent with their appropriateness for your product. A range of 0 to 100 is used in several lead rating systems, but every lead rating formula that you set up will highlight a special characteristic of your primary customer.
Here are six different lead scoring models based on the type of data you can collect from the people who engage with your business:
1. Demographic Information
Are you specifically targeting any particular group of people, like parents with small kids or CIOs? Include demographic questions on your landing pages, which can then be used to figure out how much of a match they are to your desired customer base.
You can use this data to filter out unusual prospects from your sales team’s list by subtracting points from individuals who don’t fit into the category you’re dealing with. If selling is limited to a particular region, then one should assign a bad score to any offer that doesn’t adhere to the appropriate city, state, zip code, country, etc.
If some fields on your form are not necessary (such as a telephone number), then you should reward leads who provide the information on their own.
2. Company Information
Would your B2B organization be more inclined to target certain businesses based on size, type, or field of work? Do you have a preference between B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Consumer) organizations? You can utilize your landing page forms to ask pertinent questions as a means of determining which leads fit in with your desired demographic, as well as which leads are outside the scope of your specific customer base.
3. Online Behavior
The manner in which a potential customer interacts with your site can provide insight into how keen they are to make a purchase. Examine the leads that eventually became customers: Which promotions did they acquire? How many offers did they download? How many web pages did they browse on your website before they made a purchase?
The amount and kinds of forms and pages are significant. You could assign superior lead scores to prospects who have visited prominent web pages (such as pricing pages) or filled out key forms (like a demonstration request). You could reward prospects who viewed 30 pages on your website with a greater score than prospects who viewed only three pages.
What about people who have altered their behavior over the course of time? If someone who initially was a potential business has ceased to visit your website or get your services, it is a tell-tale sign that they are no longer interested. You could deduct points from potential customers who have stopped engaging with your website after a set amount of time. It varies depending on the length of your sales cycle, ranging from as little as 10 days up to 90 days.
4. Email Engagement
If an individual has signed up to receive correspondences from your organization, it is uncertain how avid they are in purchasing from you. Open and clickthrough rates will provide an indication of how interested people are. It is important for your sales team to be aware of who opened each email in the lead nurturing sequence, as well as who consistently clicked on the offer promotion emails. They can concentrate on the people who appear to be the most interested. It could be beneficial to increase the lead score of those who click on important emails, such as demonstrations of offerings.
5. Social Engagement
You can gauge how enthusiastic a lead is about your company by monitoring their responses on social media. What was the number of times people clicked on your company’s tweets and Facebook posts? How often did they resend or distribute those messages? If the people you are trying to attract as customers are active on social media platforms, then it could be worth giving prizes to people with a certain influence score from Klout or a certain quantity of followers.
6. Spam Detection
Finally, consider providing unfavorable ratings to prospects who filled out web page forms in a manner that might suggest they are not genuine. Was the first name, last name, and/or company name not capitalized? Did the lead fill out any boxes by entering four or more characters on the standard “QWERTY” keyboard layout?
It may be advantageous to consider the kind of email addresses that prospects utilize as opposed to the ones used by your consumers. If you are targeting companies as customers, it might be better to avoid prospects who use Gmail or Yahoo! email accounts.
How to Calculate a Basic Lead Score
Various approaches can be taken to figure out a lead score. The simplest way to do it is this:
Manual Lead Scoring
1. Calculate the lead-to-customer conversion rate of all of your leads.
The proportion of new customers you acquire as compared to the total number of leads you generate is what makes up your lead-to-customer conversion rate. Use this conversion rate as your benchmark.
2. Pick and choose different attributes of customers who you believe were higher quality leads.
Attributes could include people who requested a free trial, those working in the finance sector, or those who employ 10-20 staff.
Selecting the qualities to be integrated into your model requires a particular type of artistry. Based on conversations with your sales team, analytics, and other factors, you’ll need to select characteristics, though it ultimately comes down to the choice you make. It’s possible for five distinct individuals to devise five distinct models from the same exercise. It is all right to score depending on the information that was talked about earlier.
3. Calculate the individual close rates of each of those attributes.
It is imperative to measure the success rate of any activity or individual who visits your website as this will determine the steps taken in reaction.
Work out how many people meet the criteria to become customers as a result of their behavior or the relationship they have with your main customer group. You’ll be able to evaluate them utilizing these close rates in the next step.
4. Compare the close rates of each attribute with your overall close rate, and assign point values accordingly.
Search for characteristics with closure rates much higher than your average closure rate. Then, decide which characteristics you will award points to and, if applicable, the number of points. Give points to each attribute based on how successful they are at achieving a high close rate.
The point values may not be set in stone, but strive to remain as consistent as you can. For instance, if your rate at which sales are finalized is 1% and your “requested demo” close rate is 20%, then the close rate for the “requested demo” is 20 times greater compared to your overall rate of closure – thus you can, for instance, give 20 points to leads with these qualities.
Why Should I Use Lead Scoring and Not Another Method?
It is evident that qualifying leads is necessary. Are you curious about why lead scoring is the most efficient way of determining which prospective buyers are the best fit for B2B companies? You can either match your customer profile a single time or have your sales representatives determine if they are qualified customers. The answer is simple. Ascertaining a potential customer’s level of interest in a product or service increases as they move further down the sales pipeline. In business-to-business transactions, the process from prospecting to purchase generally takes more time, and tracking the actions of prospective buyers can be invaluable for identifying their intentions. If your representatives make all the calls by hand, a considerable amount of time will be lost.
If you need additional evidence, here is some data.
- According to Hubspot, the top priority for the next 12 months for most marketers (40%) is to generate more leads.
- According to Semrush, generating more quality leads is a priority goal for 79% of marketers worldwide.
- 34% of people interviewed by Pipedrive claimed that lead qualification and prospecting are the biggest challenges for salespeople.
Conclusion
In summary, lead scoring is a vital component of today’s B2B selling and marketing. All digital businesses, regardless of their size, can gain advantages from it. Predictive lead scoring is typically more beneficial for larger companies that have huge amounts of traffic, however, rule-based lead scoring can be beneficial for any business.
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