As a business owner or head of revenue, one is constantly on the lookout for ways to increase your revenue numbers. One way to do that is by establishing an effective lead scoring system. It involves capturing and analyzing data points related to leads in order to decide which are worth pursuing and prioritize those opportunities. 

It can help your team better allocate time and resources, as well as improve ROI on marketing campaigns. The key is having optimized lead scoring best practices that ensure you are spending only the right amount of energy on leads with good potential for becoming paying customers.

Are you curious to know how you can get more leads? Read on to learn more about how our guide will help improve your lead-scoring strategies!

Let’s dive in!

What Is Lead Scoring? 

What Is Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a technique for grading leads that can help you understand their value to your company. It also allows you to handle them effectively. 

With this technique, marketing and sales teams can examine and categorize leads. They take this action according to the stages of the buyer’s demographics, journey, behavior, email interaction, and company data.

Sales and marketing teams employ the process of lead scoring to give customers points based on a combination of their demographic characteristics. It includes implicit data and explicit data.

  1. Implicit data: Page view details, number of site visits, video views, downloads, etc.
  2. Explicit data: Country, region, phone, email, etc. 

You can know the user behaviors by page visits, downloads, clicks, time spent, etc. This approach aids in lead prioritization. It also standardizes the handling of leads and establishes responsibilities and expectations. These expectations are to be made between the sales and marketing teams.

Another question that may cross your mind is how you will implement a lead scoring model.

Fret not! We have your back. 

Your sales and marketing departments must agree on what constitutes qualified leads. Then you identify common and essential characteristics of your main customers and prospects who don’t frequently convert. This is based on data from previous leads.

Data like the company’s revenue and size in a B2B might be helpful. You can get firmographic data through the landing page of products. In addition, you can also rate positive customer behaviors. It is one of the best methods to win more deals.

Importance of Lead Scoring 

Importance of Lead Scoring

Most marketing organizations lock their deals with lead scoring. They know what lead scoring is and its importance. 

All potential consumers are essential. But organizing and rapidly identifying your optimal prospects is an essential part. It allows you to move them along in your sales pipeline. This will help you make sure you can achieve your annual sales goals. 

The advantages of lead scoring extend beyond a raised bottom line to your customers and internal employees. 

Here are a few of them. 

You must include the leads from both the sales and marketing teams in developing the criteria and actions. It will affect your lead scoring technique. 

However, you can’t start creating the structure for how you should prioritize your leads. For this, you need to get their involvement and consent. 

Additionally, regular check-ins between the two departments are necessary for the continuing maintenance of your lead scoring system. It ensures that the criteria are producing the expected results. If not, new standards should be established and included in the system.

● More precise estimations

The analysis can go beyond your CRM and Marketing Automation data. That’s because now you can also use external data enrichment sources and product usage systems. Predictive lead scoring systems are supported by data gathered from various sources. 

This method results in a more detailed buyer profile. In addition, using machine learning to verify leads has a better likelihood than manually scoring. Manual scoring is prone to errors and other mistakes.

● More concentration on the team’s opinion

Even the top sales and marketing teams worldwide have people, not robots. These people can identify qualified leads. However, it can vary depending on their experiences, prejudices, and preferences. 

When opinions vary, there is a chance that you will have a variety of ideas and inaccurate scores. It could result in neglected opportunities. 

By making predictions depending on cold data, predictive lead scoring is a data-driven process. It eliminates bias, prediction, and opinion. So, your sales efforts will become more targeted as a result of the increased opportunity for data-driven decisions.

● Rapid testing and setup

A lead scoring model’s development and ongoing improvement can take a lot of time. Not only this, but it will also involve many parties. 

Predictive lead scoring will greatly reduce the time required to analyze the quality of leads. It can take these actions by automating the process. 

Go-to-market teams can unlock valuable time by focusing on their best leads. This allows them to take a more strategic and targeted approach, further advancing toward success.

● Boosts profits

More sales result from better leads allowing you to move through the sales process more quickly. The best part is that increased revenue follows it.

So, it is beyond debate that improved lead scoring contributes to higher sales income.

Lead Scoring Best Practices 

Lead scoring best practices

● Use your sales staff

Nobody will have a deeper understanding of your audience than your sales team. They have direct communication with both converts and non-converts. To develop a stronger lead scoring model, use your sales team to get insights about your prospects. In this way, you can gain an understanding of your audience.

You should also discuss with your sales representatives what causes individuals to convert. That’s because they may know that a specific blog post or video is a great selling point for your audience. That approach applies to your grading system to help assign leadership points.

This method also assists in the overall improvement of your plan. You can develop similar information if you identify the characteristics of pages or content that your audience wants.

● Speak with your customer

Speaking with your customers is one of the most important lead-scoring best practices. Customers frequently have an experience that differs from what the sales staff describes. 

Hence, you must consider all aspects of the sale to get input from both parties if you want to be successful. Interview customers to find out what encouraged them to convert. 

To learn more about what motivated people to purchase your goods, you might send them a customer satisfaction survey. It will provide you with their personal opinions. 

You should interview customers with both short and longer buying cycles. It’s a terrific approach to learning why some people convert fast while others take their time. Customers first learn whether or not to convert and trust your company. 

● Adopt a negative scoring

Negative scoring is an important lead scoring best practice, and you must use it for your lead scoring to be effective. 

Negative scoring enables you to exclude website visitors who aren’t potential customers for your company. Employees and job seekers aren’t good leads for your company sometimes. 

Employees frequently visit your website and click around to check that links are functional. Like job seekers, they will visit numerous pages on your website to learn more about your company. 

Negative scoring is a key method for assisting you in focusing on these leads. It is the most relevant strategy for your company.

● Optimize your lead scoring models for better leads

Honestly, it is not practical for most businesses to manually manage all of the parts associated with lead scoring. There are only a certain number of hours in a day when you can work. 

Moreover, there are a certain number of resources in a department that you can use. Hence, manual work doesn’t always help you expand. So, it is strongly advised to adopt marketing automation software to manage lead scoring. It allows you to obtain better value for your invested money. 

A Real Lead Scoring Example

Get your lead scoring process off the ground with a personalized scoring model. Assign points according to key factors such as industry, company size, title, and location for an effective system that works specifically for you. 

Behavior-based scoring gives you the opportunity to reward leads whose activities indicate they might be further along the buyer’s journey, such as website visits or webinar attendance. Deduction-based scoring allows you to reduce points around those who are not yet ready to buy, for instance, leads with higher bounce rates or many unsubscriptions from your emails. 

Lastly, relationship-based scoring awards points to prospects with prior engagements with sales reps or whose contact details are already in your CRM system. By slowly piecing together each aspect of this model, you will determine an effective lead score point structure that works for your team’s needs.

PropertyValuePoints
Critical (13-20 points)
TitleC-Level, VP+12
Company Revenue$250M++17
IndustryFintech+20
TimelineLess than 4 months+15
Purchase AuthorityDecision Maker+13
Important (6-12 points)
TitleManager, Operations+6
Company Revenue$50M-250M+8
IndustryBanking, Investing+13
LocationUSA or Canada+9
TimelineLess than one year+8
Influencing (1-5 points)
TitleAssociate+4
Company Revenue$10M-50M+3

Grow Your Business with a Lead Scoring Enabled CRM 

Lead scoring is a process that enables you to keep pace with the changing demands of your customers. Ranking leads will help ensure that your sales and marketing teams work together effectively to close deals. 

Orgzit is a great CRM software with built-in lead management features, automatically capturing and enriching leads in your CRM database. With Orgzit, you can track lead activities, qualify them with AI-powered contact scoring, segment leads, and nurture them into customers, all from within your CRM software. 

Without further ado, email sales@orgzit.com to increase sales and grow your business with this powerful tool! 

Schedule a call now to grow faster!

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