Lead scoring is one good way to drag the prospects on their road to purchase. Think of it as a navigator for your leads; it can show an absolute location as well as a relative one. It automatically ranks the leads according to certain criteria that you set (or marketing or sales team).
In order to nurture properly, you should have an idea about where they are in a buyer’s journey. Are they just get familiar with their problem and or your brand? Are they actively comparing vendors and looking at pricing? Understanding where your buyers are can be important in lead nurturing and lead scoring, especially when it comes to delivering relevant content.
A lead scoring system assign points to contacts based on their action taken (or not taken). Each lead gets points as they interact with your brand like opening of an email, visiting your website, downloading content, etc. one of the best thing about lead scoring is that because it relies on certain benchmarks, standards and common metrics it becomes a component that tells whether to consider lead a sales-ready lead or not.
This blog post lets you go through the process of setting up a lead scoring program. Let’s get started, and discover some tips for implementing a successful lead scoring program.
Determine your ideal buyer
Examine your current contact list before you get started. Look for some common characteristics for an initial stage of lead scoring.
- Customers’ demographics
- Types of companies usually buy your products
- Which fields does your sales team look at first when they receive a lead
- Chief attributes of your leads/customers.
Once you’ve decided the attribute of the profile you want to score, make sure you collect that information from a reliable source like website forms, surveys, or sales calls because lead scoring won’t work without data.
Assign points to profile criteria
After determining the ideal buyer, define criteria and the point value to each profile you selected. Make sure that the criteria you select and that have more points really do indicate a higher chance to buy. Here I am mentioning a basic example to make you understand more clearly:
- Assign 5 points to a lead that can be a possible buyer.
- Give 10 points to a lead that is important and have indicated some buying potential.
- Assign 15 points to a lead that has a high buying potential and is very important. So, based on the activity you can assign these scores/points to your lead. Like if they visited once on your website assign them 5 points. If they visited and spend some time on your website surfing on a product you deal in, give them 10 points. 15 points to those who contact you with some queries.
Identify behavior that indicates interest
If you provide content like ebooks, videos, white papers, PDFs, etc, and you’ve noticed that engagement on these is high and there’s more conversion then assign a high lead score to them.
Ask the sales team about content that they send to a potential buyer during the sales process that buyers usually view before making a purchase, those content should get a higher score.
Assign points to behavioral criteria
The next step in your lead scoring process is to assign and point value to each behavior. Give a higher score to behaviors that require more time commitment or indicate buying intent. For example, a lead requesting a product demo would score higher than a click on an email to get entered into a contest.
Put it all together
Once you’ve built your lead scoring model, enter this into your marketing automation software. Points will automatically assign to each contact based on their activity.
If your marketing automation platform integrated with your customer relationship management (CRM) you can set up your lead scoring program so that your sales team can see the lead score of each contact, this helps the sales team to sort the leads and engage with them accordingly.
