Marketers! Raise your hand if you've heard the following from your sales teams, though you've been pushing them tons of leads every month:
We're not getting sufficient leads for conversion
Lead quality is poor, and we're wasting our time
Shared leads are either uninterested in or unaware of our offerings
Asked us to call sometime later
You probably also have stats for every month on the number of marketing qualified leads you push to the sales teams. This is an age-old cat-and-mouse game marketing and sales teams play to try to offset the blame from their shoulders instead of working together to get the ideal leads. This is where lead scoring comes into the game.
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is the method applied to identify where your leads are at in the buying cycle and whom should you target first for easy and better conversion. The condition and criteria applied to score the leads will be different for each business depending upon the need, market, scope, price, and conversation period of the offerings.
Why do you need lead scoring for your business?
No business can ever say everyone is their target customer because for the offerings they're selling, they have a limited total addressable market (TAM). From TAM, they'll have a served available market (SAM), which is the number of people they can reach through their available channels, mediums, and resources.
Even in the served available market, the potentials will be in the various stages of the buying cycle—hot, warm, or cold leads. By using lead scoring, businesses can reap benefits, such as:
Lower acquisition cost: Instead of targeting everyone and spending a lot of money on campaigns in various forms and wasting the time of your sales teams, lead scoring helps businesses identify who is interested in their offerings. Marketing can pass these leads to sales for further follow-ups and conversion. It decreases the total acquisition cost as less money is spent. Only the sales prospecting leads are pushed to the teams for taking forward.
Higher conversion: By not chasing every lead, sales teams can target only those with high lead scores (which means they're the leads with a higher probability of conversion), which will lead to quicker and better conversion.
Increased revenue: Higher conversion and the lower acquisition cost ultimately leads to an increase in revenue.
How does lead scoring work?
To score leads, businesses need to know their existing customers' attributes in order to understand who their ideal prospects are and how they behave. Businesses need to backtrack those customers' journeys to understand where they came from, what their need was, how it was resolved, how long they took for prospecting, and what the feature/specification was that helped them make the decision faster.
With this data, combined with customer demographic information and online behavior, businesses can arrive at a scoring method.
When a new prospect enters the website, with the help of collated data and the systems in place, they will be scored. If their behavior is shadowing your ideal customer profile, they'll be marked as a hot lead, which can be passed to your sales team for further follow up.
If they're loitering around your website, trying to learn about your brand and offerings, they need to be nurtured before being pushed for a demo/sales call. Once the leads are ready to move up the scale, they can be shared with the sales team for conversion.
To set up lead scoring, lead scoring models are used by businesses that consolidate what their ideal customers are doing and the data that needs to be identified to find potentials.
Lead scoring models
Lead scoring models help businesses identify who their target audiences are based on what they do on their website, how they consume information, where they look for that information, and what information helps them make a faster decision to buy the product, etc. By understanding such touch points, businesses will be able to repeat the journey their ideal customers went through to guide ideal prospects towards faster conversions.
Based on the business you're in and your offerings, various combinations of lead scoring models can be applied to identify ideal prospects. Four commonly used lead scoring models are:
Explicit models
As the name suggests, explicit models collect information that's available explicitly or that the leads would be willing to share with the businesses. Collecting information such as the lead's name, contact, location, company, etc can help businesses if your offerings would be best suited for them. If the information matches your ideal audience, those leads can be shared with the sales teams for further follow-ups.
Implicit models
An implicit lead scoring model includes identifying the leads' online behavior. Information such as from where they've come to reach your website, what pages they're checking on, are they all high-value pages, etc. Other data, such as how long they're staying on your primary pages, how they navigate your website, and if they're checking out your pricing page can help understand their intent.
Email and social engagement
Based on your offerings and the complexity involved with implementing your solution, the buying cycle can vary from a couple of days to even a few months. So, to make a purchase decision, it's going to take multiple visits for the leads to decide if you're the correct vendor. Along with explicit and implicit data, social and email engagements should also be considered to score your leads.
If they're opening and taking action on your emails and engaging with your social posts, it shows their interest in your offerings and increases the chances of conversion.
Add negative scoring
Like how the actions a lead takes indicates they're interested, negative actions too can be added to score them. For example, if they're unsubscribing to your emails or unfollowing business social accounts, it adds to the negative scoring. You can also configure how long it takes them to revisit your website as if they're interested; it wouldn't take much. Based on that, negative scoring can be configured.
Negative scoring ultimately helps businesses refine the quality of the leads before passing them to the sales team for follow-up.
How to plan your lead scoring process
Of course, understanding lead scoring models and gathering the insights to come up with the data for your business will help. But before that, businesses should talk to the stakeholders to understand how your domain operates and how you're perceived by the customers. If you're starting out, these are the best practices for setting up lead scoring.
Lead scoring best practices
Talk to sales
As your sales team would be the first and only team to talk to your leads, it'd be best to talk to them to identify the characteristics of your ideal prospects. They can give insights on all the explicit characters, such as who they are and what they expect when they visit your website, which will help you set up lead scoring.
Talk to customers
Talking to your customers can help you understand how they've found you and what their expectations were when they came prospecting you. It helps identify the touchpoints they went through and the actions they did, which will help you shape up your lead scoring models. You also can get insights on the journey they undergo to formulate your ideal customer journey.
Identify the ideal customer journey
Talking to your sales teams and customers can help you identify the ideal journey your customers go through, which can be replicated for your ideal prospects.
Automate lead scoring
If you're formulating your models to set up scoring leads, the best practice is to automate the process as your business grows; it'd be hard to track manually and update the scores. The system you have in place to score your leads should adapt to and understand the ideal customers' journey. You can then do predictive lead scoring for better identification.
How can Zoho SalesIQ's Lead Scoring help with faster and better conversion?
Zoho SalesIQ, the Engagement Intelligence, has built-in modules such as live visitor identification and lead scoring, which allows businesses to define, set up, and automate their scoring.
With live visitor identification, you'll get to know who's visiting you, the pages they see, time spent on individual pages, and their journey throughout your site. This will give you an idea about what your ideal customers go through so you can set up criteria for your lead scoring.
Once you've arrived at the criteria you want to use, you can set up lead scoring by combining the models we discussed above. With live visitor identification, you'll have all the information you need for your implicit model. With SalesIQ's chatbot, you can nudge leads to engage with you to get the information you need for the explicit models. By combining them, you can set up lead scoring.
As we discussed above, conversion isn't going to happen the first time leads visit. SalesIQ will keep a history of your leads, and it'll score them based on the actions they take on their subsequent visits as well.
So once they qualify, you can use the filters to see the leads with high scores and pass them to sales for further follow up and conversion.
Would you like to see this in action? Sign up now for a free 15-day trial—no credit card required—and check it out yourself.
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