How lead scoring will benefit you
Lead scoring is an integral part of lead management, allowing you to track your prospects’ online behaviors and web activity to determine their level of interest in your solution, so you can decide if they are worth pursuing. It has been found that just a 10% increase in the quality of leads can translate into a 40% increase in sales productivity. Furthermore, companies that implemented lead scoring mechanisms increased their return on investment (ROI) for lead generation activities by 77%.
Your prospects are turning to websites, social media, webinars, and thought leadership to research products, services, and best practices long before they’re ready to make a purchase. When you score leads based on this behavior and perceived interest level, you can determine the most qualified leads to funnel to sales, promote sales and marketing alignment, and enhance revenue performance.
To invest in lead scoring is to make the most out of every lead that enters your pipeline as you filter out unqualified leads and focus your resources on the leads most likely to result in sales. This data can increase the success of your marketing campaigns, leading you to even more qualified leads, increasing conversion rates, and making sales skyrocket. You will strengthen the revenue lifecycle by helping sales and marketing separate ready-to-buy leads from those that need nurturing, optimizing your resources for optimum growth. On the whole, lead scoring streamlines lead flow, productivity, and efficiency between marketing and sales to simplify processes so your teams can focus on what they do best.
What's in the guide?
- What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is a shared sales and marketing methodology for ranking leads in order to determine their sales-readiness. Review lead scoring best practices and how they use demographic and firmographic attributes, such as company size, industry, and job title, as well as behavioral data, to score leads,
- Why does my business need lead scoring?
Numbers don’t lie—a 10% increase in lead quality can translate into a 40% increase in sales productivity, resulting in faster revenue flow. We’ll go over how lead scoring can help you focus on the right accounts to drive ROI and calculate win percentages to gain insight into which deals are more likely to close. You’ll also see exactly how lead scoring aligns sales and marketing, improving their symbiotic relationship and boosting productivity across the board.
- Lead scoring basics
Learn the difference between explicit lead scoring (BANT data [budget, authority, need, timeline]), and implicit lead scoring (online activity, inferred geography, data quality factors) and how to fuse the data from both to determine the prospect’s value to your business and the business’s value to the prospect.
- Getting started
Often, the hardest part of lead scoring is getting started, not because it’s complicated or time consuming, but because it requires some specific knowledge to kick things off. This section will walk you through the first steps, including the basics of reviewing data, determining ideal targets, aligning marketing with sales, and selecting scoring criteria.
- Advanced scoring strategies
Once you have the basics down, find out how to score by behavior, implement product and scoring, and monitor score degradation. We’ll also show you best practices for a regular lead scoring checkup process so you can take stock of your database, add or remove content, build new opportunities, and evaluate the accuracy of the data coming in and out of your system.
- Lead lifecycle management
The revenue cycle, or “funnel,” starts with demand generation and ends with a closed deal and a new customer. As your lead scoring program develops, you’ll need to master revenue cycle management to keep track of sales-accepted leads (SALs), recycled leads, and service-level agreements (SLAs).
- Common issues
What do you do when your data quality is poor? Is it always best to sell to big companies? Learn about common pitfalls and misconceptions marketers face when implementing a lead scoring program.
- Content marketing, social media, and lead scoring
Content marketing and social media are important tools on their own, but combined with lead scoring, they meld together to provide you with invaluable insights, transforming seemingly random actions into traceable buying patterns. Learn where each type of content fits in the lead scoring cycle, including webinars, demos, ebooks, email, social media, and more.
- The ROI of lead scoring
Discover how lead scoring can increase leads to opportunities, decrease the sales cycle duration, boost sales productivity, and generate revenue. We’ll provide examples of how you might measure and share lead scoring results to demonstrate value to further optimize your processes.
This guide will walk companies through the process of lead scoring from start to finish, improving execution with best practices and easy-to-use worksheets.
