The internet is marvellous. What an incredible resource! Its no wonder every time you want to buy something you fire up Google and start typing. Research shows in the world of B2B over 80% of purchasers feel they found their supplier, not the other way round. What a revolution!
For sellers of goods and services this presents some nasty challenges. How on earth do you sort out the wheat from the chaff? You have never met this person, never even spoken to them on the phone. Are they a genuine prospect or just a time waster? Your sales resources are precious and expensive, you want to make sure they are working on the best possible leads to turn them into customers.
Enter lead scoring. Lead scoring is the machinery, the nuts and bolts of lead nurturing. In simple terms, lead scoring assigns a value to each of your leads and decides which are the best leads for your go to market team to follow up.
The popularity of lead scoring is on
the rise, due in part to challenges listed above but also because of the ever increasing and advanced functionality of the Marketing Automation Packages available from such firms as Eloqua, Marketo, Manticore and (local Australian provider) StrategyMix.
So what are the key components of a good lead scoring system? Firstly, you have to define how well a lead "fits" to your criteria of your ideal customer profile. Clearly you must have a clear notion of what "Ideal" looks like. What job title are you targeting, do they have budget authority, what industry sector, what company size, or perhaps what technology infrastructure should they have in place? Each lead is then scored against how well they "fit". Some answers might get a negative score, for example if job title = student. This is often referred to as explicit data as its explicitly gathered from leads by the supplier.
The second major component of an effective lead scoring program is behavioural or implicit lead data, so called because a lead is implying interest in your firm's offerings by their behaviour. This is sometimes referred to as how well engaged a lead is with your firm. The vast majority of this data is gathered by tracking a lead's online behaviour. Online content provides a vital role in allowing firms to track lead behaviour. Did a lead click on a link in your email to download a whitepaper? Did they attend a webinar, download a case study, click on your pricing page, ask for a demo, start a free trial. Each of these activities attract varying scores. Its not hard to imagine a sales person getting excited about a lead who has asked for a demo or a free trial versus clicking randomly on a few pages and therefore such online activity would attract a high score.
An important element to implicit lead scoring is good content marketing, without powerful, compelling content that engages buyers there will be little implict behavior to measure. Content must talk to the buyer's in the their language about their problems and challenges. Content must change as buyers move closer to a purchasing decision as the buyers seek different information.
Once the scores from both your explicit and implicit elements have been added up you have a lead's final score. Firm's will often categorise scores into bands or groups to allow for easier interpretation. For example, A,B,C,D,E for Explicit scoring bands and 1,2,3,4 and 5 for implicit scoring bands. So in this example a lead scoring an A1 would be prioritised and sent straight to sales for immediate follow up. Less high scoring leads are still valued but may be followed up by your telesales team first for further qualification or returned by sales for further nurturing by marketing.
Lead scoring is a powerful and effective way to allow your sales resources to maximise lead to customer conversion rates. Not only that but because buyers have been effectively nurtured the retention rates typically remain signicicnatly higher.
If you want to continue to read about the inbound marketing revolution and how marketing automation can do the "heavy lifting" of marketing for you, check out this free eBook offer on content marketing.
