How Lead Scoring Helps You Win More Sales? |
Posted: June 14, 2018 |
A typical sales person spends close to 65% of his time in prospecting and qualifying a lead, according to HubSpot. That’s a lot of time to spend on a regular basis in qualifying and listing out the leads to pursue. Is there a better way to qualify sales leads? Of course, that’s when lead scoring comes in. Lead scoring is a way to assign values to the leads, based on their demography and behavior, to help you understand which one to pursue on priority. The pointing system is based on certain criteria like demography (such as company size, designation, industry, etc) and lead engagement (such as website visits, email click-throughs, webinar attendance, downloads, form submissions, etc). As time progresses, all the points accumulate to a saturation point for you to qualify them as marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and hand them to sales. Giving the right scores to leads cam guide you to contact people who are most ready to buy from you and avoid them who ain’t quite ready for that interaction. Leads with poor or low scores can be set up for nurturing program and measure their engagement to build the score. This sort of lead scoring can help close more sales. What are the common scenarios for salespeople to benefit from lead scoring?
What factors can affect a lead score?
How does lead scoring help win more sales?Before we delve more, let’s clarify that businesses need to score their leads only when their sales teams are overloaded with leads more than they can handle. If they don’t have enough leads, there is not much need to score your leads. Having said that, let’s see how lead scoring can help sales teams. Understand leads’ ‘buying’ actions: While an email open can indicate some sort of lead engagement, it’s not the most reliable action to depend on. Or, it can even be said that not all activities are of the same action. There must be certain pages that you identify as ‘high value’ such as pricing page and other pages of ‘low value’ such as career page. A salesperson can easily identify what important actions have caused the score. For instance, if two leads have the same cumulative score, lead A based on ten ‘less value’ actions and the lead B based on two ‘high value’ actions, then lead B is more promising to get converted at this point in time when compared to A. Like, a lead who is reading on software implementation is more easily convertible than one reading on what a software can do. Run successful sales campaigns: It is always good to strike while the iron is hot, hence run a sales campaign to the hot leads once they reach the threshold score. Salespeople can trigger custom built campaigns that run automatically once a lead reaches the set threshold limit. Now that you know they have the desired interest and are ready for what you have, a slight nudge can lead them to take the action. Don’t let ‘hot’ leads turn ‘cold’: The leads which have reached the threshold score are considered to be ‘hot’, which means those prospects are ready and fit to buy services from your brand. It’s the best time to trigger sales campaign to this list to see more conversions. But, as you do, you will come across few of those which don’t tend to respond to campaigns. Hence, the lead score degrades. To avoid further degradation, it’s good to trigger campaigns to those whose score goes low. For instance, there are 50 leads which are at a lead score of 100. You run a sales campaign and 10 of them don’t respond and come down to a score of 80. So, run another campaign (taking into consideration different factors) only to these 10 leads and not all the leads which are at lead score 80. Try to re-engage with them to increase the lead score and avoid letting them become cold. Allow leads to reach the highest possible score: If you have set the threshold score of 80 to call the prospects and there are not enough of them with that score. As a salesperson, it’s good to warm them up through setting up different campaigns rather than picking up the phone and call the cold leads. If you do a hard sell at an early stage, there could be a chance of high score degradation to more leads and your efforts would get doubled. Build the relationship, educate the lukewarm prospects and only when they reach the threshold start your ‘selling’ process. Let salespeople control the score: Sometimes, salespeople might disagree with a lead score post call or email engagement, and believe it not be sales-ready. Either they don’t engage as much as they should or stay static at a stage of the sales cycle without making any progress. In such scenarios, salespeople should take the call and alter the lead score. Once marketing teams have more leads that are coming back, it’s good to reset the right scores for better vision. Conclusion As a business owner, you are the right person to set scores. Because you know your customers well and understand what interactions can reflect on the buying decision. If your team is departmentalized, it’s good to approach sales or customer support teams, who interact regularly with customers, to set up scores. Often times, salespeople know what their customers did right before the conversions. Knowing that can help increase better conversions.
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