Qualifying Leads Through Lead Scoring
Lead qualification is an essential step in the sales funnel, essentially converting leads into prospects. There are many effective frameworks for lead qualification, such as lead scoring, which can help you to identify which leads are most likely to become clients, and are, therefore worth prioritizing.
In this article, we will take a look at what lead scoring can accomplish, as well as an outline of the lead scoring process and its benefits.
What is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring is a framework for qualifying leads by assigning a ‘score’ to your leads and ranking them from most to least likely to become client. It is not dissimilar to the BANT framework, in that it asks you to analyze different factors to determine the likelihood of a lead being converted.
Lead scoring takes into account a variety of factors, including a lead’s demographics (such as job title and company size), their behavior (such as website visits and email opens), and their level of engagement with your company (such as attending a webinar or requesting a demo). Each of these factors is given a certain ‘score’ or point value, and the total sum is used to determine the lead’s level of interest and likelihood of converting into a client.
The Lead Scoring Process, Explained
The lead scoring process involves designating a point value to the various traits of your leads to arrive at a final sum, or score. Each trait will have a different weight based on its importance to you and your business, and the final score of each lead will help you to determine which leads to focus on, and which are unlikely to convert.
Some of the different traits to focus on during the lead-scoring process are:
- Demographics
- Industry
- Company Size
- Interest Shown in Your Business
- Buyer Persona
- Quality
- Engagement
Step One: Define your Ideal Client:
First and foremost, identify and define the ideal client that you would like to target in your lead-scoring process. This might include factors such as company size, industry, job title, and geographic location. You can use your list of buyer personas for this step, and decide which ones are best suited for this specific process.
Step Two: Identify Scoring Criteria
Determine which behaviors are most indicative of a lead’s likelihood to convert. This could include them visiting your website, filling out a form, subscribing to an email list, or requesting a demo.
Step Three: Assign Point Values
Assign a point value to each of your scoring criteria based on how indicative it is of the lead’s likelihood to convert to a client. For example, subscribing to an email list is much more suggestive of intent to buy than simply visiting your website.
Step Four: Set Scoring Thresholds
Decide how much a lead should score in order to be qualified. You can set a higher threshold for leads that are especially promising, or a lower threshold for those that will require further nurturing. The leads that score higher can be qualified as prospects and are ready for the next stage of nurturing.
Step Five: Implement Your Scoring System
You can use marketing automation or CRM (customer relationship management) software to track your leads and assign scores based on their behavior and interactions with your business. Examples of this software include LeadSquared and Zoho.
Step Six: Continuously Monitor and Refine
Continuously review your scoring system to determine if it still aligns with your criteria, and evaluate its effectiveness. Adjust point values and scoring thresholds as needed to improve the accuracy of your lead scoring process.
The Benefits of Lead Scoring
There are a plethora of great benefits to the lead scoring process. These include:
- Improved Quality of Leads: With the lead scoring system, you can identify and focus only on the higher-quality leads.
- Increased Efficiency: By prioritizing leads based on their likelihood to convert, it reduces wasted time and resources spent on nurturing low-quality leads.
- Increased ROI: By focusing on the most qualified leads, lead scoring can help improve the ROI of your strategies by switching the focus on the leads most likely to convert. Reports show that companies that use lead scoring in their strategies can potentially benefit from up to a 70% increase in lead generation ROI, compared to those that do not use lead scoring.
- Effective Lead Nurturing: Lead scoring can help you identify leads that require further nurturing or education before they are ready for the next stage, enabling you to provide more targeted and effective lead nurturing.
Conclusion
Lead scoring is a powerful tool for qualifying leads, which allows you to focus your resources on the most promising leads while ignoring low-quality leads.
By assigning a score to each lead based on factors such as demographics, behavior, and engagement, you can identify the leads most likely to become clients and prioritize your sales efforts accordingly. By implementing the lead scoring process, you can improve your sales and marketing performance, increase conversion rates, and drive revenue growth.
