When onelead comes to you, he is not always ready for the purchase decision. He may be in the awareness stage or still developing interest in your product. In this case, a sales approach can have the opposite effect and end up scaring away your opportunity.
It is precisely to avoid wrong steps and optimize the work of Sales and Marketing, that we should do lead scoring or, in plain English, lead qualification.
In case you don't know what lead scoring is or don't know how to apply it, continue reading this post and discover five tips to put into practice in your company.
In this post you can check:
- After all, what is lead scoring?
- What are the benefits of Lead Scoring?
- How to do Lead Scoring?
- Have a well-established persona
- Define a scoring method
- Choose which information to analyze
- Analyze the behavior of your leads
- Automate the process
After all, what is lead scoring?
Lead Scoring is a method of classifying leads, which consists of identifying those who are ready for a sales approach, and those who need more time to mature the idea.
This can be done in converting subscribers to enrolled, for example, where you categorize subscribers according to the nutrition streams they've already gone through and identify those who can receive an active follow up from the commercial team.
During that qualification process, leads are ranked by points, the higher this score, the greater their purchase intent. This assessment is based on the lead profile. That is, the more your lead is aligned with your persona, the higher your points will probably be.
In addition, the assessment also takes into account the actions of the lead during your shopping journey. For example, downloaded ebooks, registration on your landing page, emails, WhatsApp interactions or even polls answered, all of this shows that the lead is increasingly interested in your service or product.
For the Marketing and Sales team, this entire process is essential, as this way your company can estimate sales possibilities. Therefore, to build Lead Scoring, the tip is to unite both teams in order to obtain the best results.
What are the benefits of Lead Scoring?
Before talking about the benefits of Lead Scoring, we want to ask you two questions: Have you been able to reach your goals in lead capture? And of these leads, has the result of your conversion been satisfactory?
Often, the lead is ready to complete their purchase and needs a certain push from the sales team. But, in some cases, they end up not receiving contact from the team or the desired support, and stop midway.
So that this situation does not happen within your company, it is important to bet on Lead Scoring. In that case, the Lead Scoring increases the productivity of the Marketing and Sales team by identifying which leads are ready to make the decision.
In addition, Lead Scoring provides a much more effective and faster analysis, and can help you segment your lead more precisely.
In the capture process, Lead Scoring can also shorten the consumer journey and increase the conversion rate by focusing on the most qualified leads who are ready for the next step. Two other major benefits of this process are: cost reduction and adoption of assertive strategies.
It's not news that the Digital Marketing team needs to invest in different strategies to attract potential customers, but with Lead Scoring it is possible to identify the customer's stage and invest in more assertive tactics,as a consequence, reducing your team's efforts and costs.
At this point, Lead Scoring not only optimizes the work of the marketing team, but also the work of the sales team. A practical example of this are calls through the call center. With Lead Scoring, your company avoids contacting the entire base, without criteria, and starts directing calls to those customers who are ready for this approach.
And since we're talking about benefits, we couldn't fail to mention the decrease in the churn rate, a metric that indicates the number of customers dropping out. After all, with Lead Scoring, you can identify customers who really have an affinity with your brand and are likely to become your future customer.
Not to mention that, by offering more targeted solutions to the pain of your potential customer, Lead Scoring can also contribute to your relationship with the lead, increasing the level of customer satisfaction and even loyalty.
"Ok, I understand that Lead Scoring is essential. But how can I apply it in my company?"
If this doubt crossed your mind, know that this is a common question for those who are starting in the Digital Marketing universe. So today we're going to dive deeper into the subject and explain how you can put it into practice. Let's go?!
How to do Lead Scoring?
By now, you already understood what Lead Scoring is and its importance, right? So, the time has come to put it into action. Below, we’ve put together five tips for doing good Lead Scoring within your company, such as:
- Have your persona well established;
- Choose which information will be analyzed;
- Define a scoring method;
- Analyze your lead's behavior;
- Automate the process.
Shall we check each point in more detail?
1- Have a well-established persona
I imagine you're looking forward to the lead score, aren't you? But wait, we'll get there! First of all, it's important that you keep your ideal client in mind, that is, your well-established persona.
Having defined your ideal customer based on real data will help in all the steps ahead, including when your sales team gets in touch with your qualified leads or your marketing teams create more assertive strategies and content according to the journey of the consumer.
2- Define a scoring method
To qualify leads, it's important to define a scoring method. This can be through letters - A, B, C, D and E, for example -, numerical scales - 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 - or by "temperature" - hot, warm, cold, very cold . This decision is up to your sales team, in line with marketing.
A method that has been widely applied is the decreasing score. The lead starts with 100 points, for example, and goes down as it interacts with the various engagement triggers. This way, you are sure that only new leads are part of your list and identify their maturity level to receive a sales contact.
3- Choose which information to analyze
One of the most important steps is choosing the criteria to qualify leads. Here, there is no rule. It is necessary to analyze what information is more really in line with your company and customers.
The tip is: choose two to four criteria that will help you identify whether your lead is ready for a decision. Some examples of criteria worth considering are: email behavior and engagement. When defining the criteria, it is time to classify the weight of each one of them.
Read too:
- What is the connection between CRM and the purchase funnel stages?
- What is CRM and how can you use it to boost your student’s capture?
- 6 Buyer’s Journey Insights in Analytics Strategies
4- Analyze the behavior of your leads
After defining how to classify leads, you must analyze their behavior in order to detect how advanced they are in the buying journey. This can be done by looking at CRM data, but mostly based on reports from your marketing automation tool.
What content has already been accessed? What kind of interactions did the lead have with the brand? Has he asked for a free demo or a consultant contact? Is he the decision maker or are other people involved in the process?
It's important that you understand the relevance of each interaction so you don't end up with a flawed lead qualification system. The simple download of an e-book does not always correspond to the opportunity to convert subscribers into enrolled. You must analyze the entire trajectory of this lead and how it has been behaving.
5- Automate the process
Lead qualification serves to segment your base so that only the leads with the highest chance of conversion are addressed, while the rest follow the nurturing flow.
Doing this classification manually takes a lot of time and opens up gaps for misinterpretation. Therefore, the ideal is that you automate the process by investing in new technologies, such as the Hubspot, a tool created based on the methodology Inbound Marketing that unites all your teams and offers many resources in one place.
With the well-defined criteria and the parameterized system, each possible customer that enters is directed to the right nutrition flows and, when the time comes for a more direct approach, your commercial team has the contact list ready.
In addition, you can consult the contents that have been downloaded, the pages visited and other behaviors that help you understand what are the arguments to be used when converting subscribers into registered users.
Now that you've understood what Lead Scoring is and discovered that it's essential for your Marketing and Sales team, it's not time to stop here!
If you want to delve deeper into the universe of Digital Marketing, get in touch with our team of experts and find out how Lead Scoring combined with your Inbound strategy can benefit your company.
Portugal