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5 Reasons You Should Consider Lead Scoring

5 Reasons You Should Consider Lead Scoring

If you want to make informed and calculated decisions about your leads, then consider lead scoring! This process assigns values to a lead’s actions, allowing you to better understand when it’s the right time to start moving them through the funnel and pass them on to the sales department.

First, you will need to start generating leads. Once you have leads flowing in, it’s time to start qualifying, nurturing, and distributing them. Keep in mind, not all leads are equal. Some may take a little more time to make certain actions, while others may be further along in the sales process. 

When setting up your lead scoring system, focus on about 4-6 major segments to score your leads on. Remember, in the beginning, you want to be broad while you learn about your audience’s behavior.

These segments might include: 

  • Specific pages viewed on your website
  • Form fills
  • Website visits
  • Downloads

Using this process has many advantages for a business. Find out why you should consider lead scoring as a part of your business plan. 

1. Aligns your marketing, sales, and leadership teams

Let’s face it, if your marketing, sales, and leadership teams are not on the same page, there will be misunderstandings. By incorporating lead scoring in your business processes, you are ensuring a uniform way to work with leads across different departments. 

Think about how your marketing and sales team already interact. What problems do they face? If you are struggling to identify what leads to focus your efforts on, or when to work a potential lead, a lead scoring system can help relieve this problem. 

If each action has a set value, it takes the guesswork out of the equation. Establish a certain point value that identifies a threshold so both teams will be able to know when the proper handoff should be. 

As always, communication is key. When you first start to implement this system, talk with your teams about what information would be useful to increase the opportunity for success as leads transition into another part of the buyer journey. 

Another great way to align your teams is by taking the time to develop primary, secondary, and negative buyer personas. All members of your teams can refer to these to know exactly what defines your target audience and the most effective way to interact with them.  

2. Helps establish lifecycle stages on a deeper level

The buyer journey is not as easy to define as it once was. With more ways to learn and engage with products or services before buying, it can get tricky to understand what they are thinking. By using a lead scoring system, you will be able to get a better idea of what stages buyers go through on their buyer journey just by tracking the actions they take. 

These stages typically are: 

  • Subscriber
  • Lead
  • Marketing Qualified Lead
  • Sales Qualified Lead
  • Opportunity
  • Customer
  • Evangelist
  • Other

Each stage represents a transition down the funnel. As they perform actions that take them into a different stage, your team will be ready to provide them with exactly what they are looking for. 

3. Supports workflow development

Being able to understand your customer’s journey allows you to know exactly what message to send and when to send it. Isn’t that what marketing is all about? 

With these insights, you can create workflows that support the actions you want your customers to take and continue to move them along through the funnel toward your desired outcome. 

Lead scores can help you create and automate workflows to trigger certain events when a customer has a certain score. For example, if a user subscribes to your blog, it could trigger a “Welcome New Subscriber” email. Personalized details like this keep potential leads engaged in what you have to offer. 

When creating your workflows, think about what type of content leads might be interested in while they are starting to show interest. How can you keep their attention? Take the time to create content specific to the different stages of the buyer journey to keep them wanting more.

4. Improves list segmentation ability

Lead scoring allows you to create various segments of leads depending on what stage they may be in. Being able to use user data to create segmented lists makes a marketer’s job more efficient. 

Grouping potential customers through similar actions make it easier to prioritize your time and resources. No one wants to spend hours and hours deciding who is worth your time and who isn’t, rather you can focus on a potential segment that might need more of your attention. 

Having a successful middle-of-the-funnel segment is key because it is where you will have to convince your leads why they need you. 

5. Increases your win rate for leads

An inbound marketing plan uses a lot of time and energy to try to get your potential customers to perform an action. Make the most out of your investment by implementing lead scoring into your process.  

Lead scoring helps build the foundation for your marketing plan. It gives you the ability to know when to take action, especially on promising leads. In the end, saving you time and resources to nurture the leads that show the most intent. 

Lead scoring isn’t going to solve all of your problems, but it can make each sales cycle faster and increase productivity for the sales team. With technology today, you can even automate the lead scoring process to make it even more simple to implement in your business. There is even predictive lead scoring that uses large amounts of data and artificial intelligence to predict when leads will perform certain actions or make purchases.  

As you can see, this system can go a long way in helping your business grow. By attributing values to actions and complementing them with your buyer journey stages, lead scoring can help make the most of your marketing efforts and lead to more sales for your business.  

Are you interested in implementing lead scoring in your business? Let the experts at Pinckney Marketing help! As an inbound agency, we specialize in lead generation. We can help you use lead scoring to nurture the right leads and grow your business.

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This content was originally posted in November 2017 and has been refreshed in March 2020.