Lead Scoring: Everything You Need to Know
What is lead scoring?
Lead Scoring is a method used to rank prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value each lead represents in the organization. The resulting score is used to determine which leads will engage, in order of priority.
The lead scoring methodology includes both direct and indirect data. Direct or explicit data includes data about or by the prospect. Example: Company name, industry, title, and location. Indirect data or implicit data is often derived from monitoring a prospect’s behavior such as visits, downloads, opens, and clicks.
Why do B2B marketers leverage lead scoring?
Lead scoring helps marketers analyze a prospect’s social presence and their activities on social networking sites. Lead scoring not only allows a business to customize a prospect’s buying experience but greatly improves the willingness or readiness of leads that are delivered to the sales teams for follow-up.
Benefits of Lead Scoring
1. Increased sales and marketing effectiveness
Lead scoring helps in focusing on sending highly qualified leads to the sales team and helps one to ensure that low-valued ones are not perceived further.
While marketing teams do lead scoring, they automatically tend to concentrate more on the lead characteristics and the types of leads that matter most. This way marketing teams can effectively target leads and deliver more quality leads to the sales.
2. Great sales and marketing alignment
Lead scoring helps the sales and marketing teams to create goals and discuss the quality and quantity of the leads generated. This in turn strengthens the relationship between them.
3. Increased ROI
A highly qualified lead converts to a sale much faster than a lead with a lower lead score. This conversion leads to an increase in revenue.
Elements of Effective Lead Scoring System
Every organization will have a different lead scoring model for assigning points. Let us divide each element into different phases and discuss the basic and essential elements here…
1. Pre demo research of prospect
The first phase of the lead scoring process will contain demographic and company information. Some of the examples include Contact/company/email/phone, Level, Title, # of connections, # years in B2B sales, # years in email marketing, LI groups they belong to, EMP size, Type, Industry, and specialties.
2. Lead Qualification and Discovery Phase
This phase is all about finding if the prospect is a right fit, is customer right. This phase may include details regarding sales and target.
Sell: What do they sell? Their average sale size or ROI?
Target: Who their ideal prospects are? Sample customer profiles. What is their niche?
Challenges: This is a very important attribute as you need to learn about the current challenges they are facing as well as the competitors they are evaluating and the marketing systems they have previously used.
3. Product demo phase
You can write down your observations during the demo in this phase. Examples include
Buying signals: Pricing plan or solution they liked. Did the prospect talk about the next steps? Which feature excited them the most? Who in the company will be using your products and why? These questions also help you redefine your target market as well. Ask for and write the exact words for these questions.
Budget: Ask about their approximate budget and their buying steps.
Discounts: Note down the discounts and SKUs discussed.
Objections: Discuss the things that you should try to address if possible.
Note down 3+ discovery and remember points. These points to remember can be used to advance the sale- deadline.
4. Demo summary
In this phase, you will summarize the demo on the likelihood to buy and the lead match.
Total lead score = person details +company details + lead target + buying time frame. Add to score 0, 100, or 200. Categorize the time frame into <30 days and 30-60 days.
5. Your Next Steps
This is your last and final phase where you note down your next steps in the selling process.
For example: Sending the slide deck/presentation, samples (if any), the next follow-up date with the prospect.
LeadGrabber Pro is an automated B2B lead generation software that helps you to generate qualified B2B sales leads. It helps you to generate high-probability leads that are ready to buy your product or service.
