What is lead scoring and how do I use it?

What is lead scoring?

Lead scoring is one of the best free ways to filter leads and invest time and resources towards closing more deals. It is a process for interacting with leads for the purpose of qualifying them. This is done using data such as behaviour, firm data, location. Thus, knowing this allows you to tailor their experience based on how likely they are to become customers.

The purpose of lead scoring is to instill confidence in sales teams. This is by providing a numerical value to each lead that helps predict the conversion potential. Lead scoring allows marketers to filter leads from unknown, warm, hot and cold prospects. Many prospects may lack a use case, have budgets that do not fit – so it is valuable to know early. This allows sales reps to focus their time on the most qualified leads first, ultimately improving their close rates and customer churn rates. Further, lead scoring can help align your marketing and sales efforts.

Some lead scoring tools include Active Campaign and 6sense.

How to use lead scoring

Once you have found out which leads are more valuable to you, you must use these scores effectively.

Look to current data

Analyzing your data is about finding your goals and tracking their performance. What are your goals? What tools do you have available to measure them? How well are you doing at meeting these goals? Every detail matters so what ever data is available, take advantage of it. Attribution reports can be a good way to figure out where you are converting prospects. You can allocate a higher score to content that has previously resulted in a lot of traction. This can be applied to other forms of marketing that you have conducted. Perhaps your PPC or email campaigns have resulted in high conversion. Attract high scoring leads by knowing which ones have worked best.

Look to internal sources

Your sales team work with leads all day. Ask them directly what material is helping to convert. Therefore, you should focus on delivering the material that is relevant to them.

Look to external sources

Ask your clients directly because they can share what incentivised them to buy.

Finally

There are many ways to use lead scoring to help focus your efforts.  Once you have, it is important to recognise lead conversion metrics you should track.