Lead Scoring is your not-so-secret secret tool for generating sales-qualified leads. But there’s a lot more than just setting up a lead-scoring strategy.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you know how important it is to identify the best leads. Your sales and marketing teams don’t have time to manually identify leads ready to convert and which ones still need nurturing.

That’s where lead scoring comes in! Dive in and see precisely how you can start generating more qualified leads. (Spoiler: Automation is involved. It’s nice when things can just run on their own.) 

The Basics of Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a method of ranking prospective customers based on their buying likelihood. In this way, lead scoring functions as a way to prioritize leads and sales opportunities by providing a metric for the marketing team to judge the quality of each new lead.

Marketers can focus their efforts on sales leads with higher potential rather than wasting time on low-grade prospects who won’t convert into paying customers. Lead scoring has shown to be effective at improving conversion rates by up to 20%. It enables companies to set up automated campaigns that deliver offers and messages specifically designed for specific types of customers (rather than generic ones).

Lead scoring takes many different forms. Some companies use multiple steps in sorting leads. Some use simple metrics such as age or lifestyle factors, while others (Like Hovi) rely on more complex algorithms that include criteria like email open rates and website page views over time.

Lead Scoring Criteria

If you’re like most businesses, your lead scoring criteria are probably off-the-cuff. Hot leads are identified based on the old gut instinct and a lack of data: “That’s a good lead,” or “This one looks promising.”

The problem with this approach is that it relies on subjective data in place of objective numbers. And while human intuition can be very reliable, it can also be very flawed. 

Suppose you want to ensure consistency and accuracy with your lead generation efforts. There’s no substitute for ensuring your team understands what makes a great lead. Then, set up appropriate scoring criteria to catch those good ones before they get away from you.

You need to be able to make decisions about how closely each person should follow up or whether they should continue pursuing the lead at all based on their score. 

Identify the interactions and touchpoints at every stage of the buyer’s journey, and assign the appropriate scores. Some interactions will be worth more than others. For example, opening an email may be worth 5 points, clicking a link within an email might be worth 10, and visiting your pricing page could be 15.

Here are a few touchpoints along a prospect’s journey you should consider:

1. Your website and its (many) pages
2. Your email campaigns and the links within them
3. Your Ad campaigns
4. Your Landing Pages
5. Your blog and its articles
6. Webinar Registrations
7. Lead Magnet Downloads

Lead Nurturing

You might be thinking, “What is lead nurturing?” Let’s back up a bit here. Lead nurturing is publishing and sending high-value content to leads based on their behaviors and actions. Its focus is to create high-value touchpoints between the brand and the prospect.

Let’s say you’re MailChimp — you’d want to be able to tell your customers what happens next in the process when someone signs up for your service. You’d like to welcome a user into your community and maybe even offer tips on how they can start using it right away, right?

You could send out an email with those exact details. Even better is that such emails can, and do, come automatically! 

Why is Lead Scoring Important?

It’s worth noting that lead scoring has a big positive impact on your growth departments. Let’s break down the benefits of lead scoring from those two perspectives:

• Marketing: Without a doubt, lead scoring is essential for marketing teams. It helps them focus on creating quality, high0value content to nurture and convert leads. Lead scoring also allows marketing teams to leverage marketing automation tools’ full potential. These tools’ core functions are tracking performance and optimizing campaigns for improved results. They need a way to classify leads into different categories for appropriate prioritization. Lead scores enable you to identify which leads are most likely to convert into customers based on their behavior and activity with your company. This allows you to allocate more resources toward qualified prospects ready for sales outreach. You’ll also be able to focus your nurturing on low-score leads to increase their likelihood of converting.
• Sales: Many sales teams depend on their marketing team to deliver qualified leads for them to close. They also need accurate data when deciding how much time and attention each prospective buyer warrants. It only makes sense that they’d want access to reliable sources when deciding whether or not it’s worth reaching out before moving forward with any given opportunity! By providing them with sales qualfied leads no one will waste time going after opportunities that won’t amount to an authentic deal.

What You Need to Score Leads

To create an effective scoring model, you need a few things:

• A target buyer persona
• Some data from the past (i.e., historical conversion rates)
• A high-level understanding of your product or service.

How Do You Score Leads?

Well, you’ll need a few things:

1. A consistent process. This is crucial to lead scoring.
2. A consistent set of data. Make sure it can be used across all stages of your funnel to help you generate a score for each lead.
3. Consistent scoring criteria. Take the time to organize your reporting and databases for scoring, not just delivering reports. It’ll be impossible for you to set up a complete and automated lead-scoring mechanism – the organization will be vital to building more robust systems.
4. Score thresholds for each funnel stage. This will allow you to track a lead’s journey through your funnel and personalize their nurturing by funnel stage.
5. A marketing automation tool. You’ll need a robust tool to simplify the setup process. You’ll also want to automate the nurturing outreach you send out so you can focus on better personalization and creating unique, high-value content.

Conclusion

Leverage lead scoring to tailor your marketing strategies better and help your sales team close more deals with qualified leads. It’s a simple way to help your brand grow and prepare for scaling operations.

If you’re looking to set up your lead scoring, reach out to our SMarketing Experts and get a better idea of how you can leverage automated lead scoring to grow, to scale, to lead.