What are the benefits of lead scoring? It helps you rank prospects and identify high quality leads. Understanding which leads are more likely to convert will help you save time, and ultimately improve your bottom line.
Increased Sales Efficiency
Lead scoring provides insights into consumer readiness (are they ready to make a purchase?). For instance, have you ever walked into a store and been completely overwhelmed by a sales person? No one wants to feel pressured into to making a purchase. These types of sales tactics frustrate, annoy, and result in people leaving the store.
The same theory goes for online sales. You don’t want to be bombarding prospects with detailed information about your product if they are only just entering the research phase. Lead scoring helps you identify where your prospects are in the sales process, and when a lead should continue to be nurtured versus when a sales rep should pick up the phone and make a call.
Increased Marketing Effectiveness
Lead scoring enables you to effectively measure the ROI of your marketing efforts. It allows you to take a close look into which channels and programs are producing high quality leads. This way, you can make informed decisions into which areas you should reinvest your dollars in the future.
Additionally, lead scoring helps improve lead nurturing. By identifying where your prospects are in the buying cycle, you’ll then be able to send targeted content that is most relevant to them. Providing information that customers want and need is one of the best ways to build trust. And when you have customers that trust you, you are able to grow your business and have clients for life.
Improved Sales & Marketing Alignment
Lead scoring promulgates collaboration between marketing and sales. The two must work together as a team to define the profile of sales-ready leads. Understanding what type of prospects convert is key. From there, marketing can create targeted programs for these prospects, and hand off sales-ready leads to Sales to close the deal.
Feedback is critical with lead scoring. Open communication about whether a sufficient amount of leads are being passed to sales, and if those leads are in fact sales ready will help when evaluating and tweaking the lead scoring model.
Increased Revenue
Every lead has an associated cost. You save money when you can effectively identify hot leads, and sales isn’t wasting time on leads that are not ready to convert. This alone will undoubtedly improve the customer experience by providing prospects with relevant content based on where they are in their buying journey. It will help build trust while simultaneously allowing you to avoid alienating prospective customers by approaching them too soon in the process.
When implemented correctly, the benefits of lead scoring will help you increase company revenue is a variety of ways:
- Identifying which marketing efforts are driving qualified leads
- Segmenting and communicating with leads based on their sales readiness level
- Improving time management for your sales team
Getting Started
Lead scoring does not have to be overly complicated. It all starts with getting marketing and sales together in a room to discuss your ideal customer and reviewing current program offerings and past sales.
It’s about understanding what has worked in the past and what qualities an ideal customer possesses. This then gets broken down into more detailed implicit and explicit data points. These items are then organized by level of importance and ranked.
After the program is outlined, it’s time to find a platform that best suits your needs. There are a variety of solutions available. Measured Results Marketing would be more than happy do walk you through this process and make recommendations. We are the YETIS and we make sure that your technology doesn’t get in the way of your marketing. Send us an email and we’ll help you get started.
*Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
