Introduction to Lead Scoring
Lead scoring can be defined as the process of objectively ranking one sales lead against another. It helps in aligning the right follow-up timeline with a particular lead. It assists marketing and sales professionals by identifying the exact position of a lead in the sales funnel.
The Role of Lead Scoring in B2B Business
Why Should You Use Lead Scoring in Your B2B Business?
Did you know that businesses lose over 70 percent of leads due to unsatisfactory follow-up practices? This problem can be resolved by ranking these leads based on their probability of conversion as compared to others.
In an interview with Media 7, Dmitri Lisitski, co-founder and CEO of
Influ2, talked about the
challenges that B2B marketers face.
The biggest challenge that B2B marketers face is that they often fail to grasp how imprecise their marketing is. Just connecting with employees at a target account doesn’t mean that you’re being successful - you have to engage the actual decision-makers or buying group.”
Dmitri Lisitski, co-founder and CEO of Influ2
Lead scoring marketing helps leads follow through on their purchases seamlessly. It also boosts engagement, saves time by helping you skip low-quality leads, and brings the sales and marketing teams together.
Let us look into the advantages of B2B lead scoring in detail:
Aligns the Marketing and Sales Teams
If an effective marketing lead scoring strategy is created, the marketing and sales teams can work together towards similar goals. The sales team can assess which leads have more potential, while the marketing team can develop hyper-personalized content to attract and convert these leads. They waste no time chasing low-quality leads. The overall sales cycle can be shortened, and performance efficiency can be improved.
Improves Conversion Rates
When your sales reps only attend to leads with a lead score of 50 or above, you will see an increase in your conversion rates. Leads with a score of below 50 are nurtured using automated lead nurturing email workflows.
Generates Higher Revenue
Based on a detailed study by Eloqua, an
Oracle subsidiary, B2B companies using a lead scoring model saw an increase in close rates of 30 percent, ROI by 18 percent, and revenue per deal by 17 percent. This is a good enough reason for B2B companies to adopt marketing lead scoring as a part of their strategy.
Lowers Marketing & Acquisition Costs
It helps with identifying and cutting down on marketing channels that drive low-quality leads. This lowers the marketing and acquisition costs and helps with enhanced resource allocation and improving the overall efficiency of the marketing team.
Makes Lead Evaluation Easier
If you employ an automated sales lead scoring platform, you can rapidly qualify leads based on the criteria you select. Attributes and behavior of common clients contributes to high quality lead scoring. You can easily figure out which leads need extra attention and which ones are ready to convert and become customers.
Strengthens Relationship with Leads
Through a sales lead scoring platform, you can understand your leads’ needs, challenges, interests, and expectations. This knowledge can assist you in creating hyper-personalized content to attract customers. Since you offer them just what they want, your connection with leads becomes stronger and they start trusting your brand more.
Provides Insights into Leads’ Buying Process
Leads that are generated through
marketing automation may be at different positions in the sales funnel. Using lead scoring, you can interpret the leads’ next steps in the buyer journey. With the right follow-ups to convert leads, it becomes easier because of this information.
Lead Scoring Best Practices
Follow these lead scoring model best practices for B2B business growth:
Establish Unified Customer Profile (UCP)
Know your customer by collecting data from different touch points like sales, websites, chats, and any other third-party data. You can consider using platforms like
Leadspace that offer the right tools to gather data.
Collect Customer Data Online
Create content like case studies, webinars, monthly newsletters, or infographics so leads share their information in exchange for these content pieces. Forms like quote requests, contact forms, and surveys can be used to gather customer information. Through this information, you can find the highest quality leads first.
Set Up Intelligent Engagement Scoring System
If some leads visit your website to check out a particular resource over and over again but show no other sign of becoming warm leads, degrade their lead score. This increase the efficiency of your teams, saves their time and efforts so they can focus on the leads that matter.
Choose an AI-based Lead Scoring Model
Choose an artificial intelligence (AI) based model because it creates persona models to identify the leads that fit your pre-defined unified customer profile. It uses information like job titles, technology awareness, skills, and other interests to categorize them. Lead scoring marketing automation is a great way to increase campaign efficiency.
Assign Scores Based on Content Engagement
Based on the content leads interact with, assign them different scores. For example, if a lead visits your product page, their intent could be to purchase the product or do some research on it. Such a lead should get a higher score. Instead of numbers, assign terms like high, medium, or low to categorize leads.
Use Intent Signals
Include intent signals in your B2B lead scoring so you can narrow down your targeting and personalize interactions related to a specific topic your leads may respond to. Tailoring your content and advertising becomes easier once you understand your leads’ needs, preferences and expectations.
Lead Scoring Model Ideas
B2B Scoring Model
This is an ideal model for B2B lead generation. It targets leads on the basis of certain attributes like job titles, business types, departments, website visits, email engagement, and many others. A lead scoring example for an IT firm may look like this:
Business size:
1-20 employees - 10 points
21-100 employees - 5 points
101+ employees - 2 points
Department:
IT - 10 points
All other departments - 1 point
Title:
Vice president - 10 points
Manager - 5 points
Analyst - 1 point
Predictive Model
This model uses machine learning and computer algorithms to collect first and third-party data like behaviour, intent, and firmographic and demographic data. It assigns scores to the leads based on this data. It works best when sales and marketing teams are aligned.
Email Engagement Model
Email marketing software helps you measure the email open rate, click through rate, and the number of people who have never opened or interacted with your email marketing campaign. An
email engagement model helps you identify hot leads so you can tailor your new campaigns accordingly. Businesses that rely on
email marketing can benefit the most from this model.
Other common models include website visitor monitoring, suitability and activity monitoring, social influence, and urgency monitoring model.
Popular lead scoring examples are
Lead Pilot, Cyberclick,
Business2Community,
Hubspot, and Silverpop.
Leadspace Helped RingCentral Triple Its Conversion Rates
Leadspace is a well-known lead scoring platform. Using Leadspace’s lead-to-account matching solution in their account-based strategy, RingCentral, Inc., a cloud-communications company, saw a >300% increase in lead-to-opportunity conversion rate.
Summing It Up
Lead scoring helps you spend more time with leads that are ‘ready to buy’. It creates a bridge between sales and marketing and contributes to higher conversion rates in the B2B domain.
FAQ
What is the most important benefit of B2B lead scoring?
The most important benefit of B2B lead scoring is that it bridges the gap between marketing and sales teams so they can chase similar business goals.
What are the crucial metrics of the email engagement model?
Open rates, click through rates, and unsubscribes are some of the crucial metrics of an email engagement model.
How can you improve the efficiency of your lead scoring model?
Follow up with your sales team to understand if any improvements or adjustments need to be made, if too many or too few leads are hitting the scoring threshold, so you can tweak your model for better performance.