Identify and Nurture Your Most Promising Leads

As real-time data capabilities are becoming widely available, businesses can leverage them to get a competitive advantage and improve sales team efficiency. It helps business leaders or sales managers create and implement sales strategies to improve conversion rates.

One such strategy is Lead Scoring, which uses lead activities and behavior data to convert potential customers.

Do you know the average rate of converting marketing-qualified sales leads to sales-qualified sales leads is 13%? Businesses should leverage advanced technology and real-time data to increase SQLs and, thus, revenue. Around 80% of marketing leads get ignored. Lead scoring is one such process that helps to address each lead.

Lead scoring is a process of assigning scores or values to leads to track and manage their progress in the buying cycle. A higher lead score indicates the lead has a higher potential to become a customer. The lead scoring model helps businesses determine where in a funnel or at what stage of maturity the lead is.

Using this method, businesses of all types can identify the prospects most likely to become customers and prioritize them. Once the highly qualified potential customers are sorted, steps need to be taken to convert them and encourage them to purchase.

Before creating lead scoring, it is essential to understand what matters for your business and how you will assign scores to your leads.

Businesses use various tactics that suit them best. Some get data by directly interviewing their customers, from the sales team, through sales analytics, etc. Let’s discuss more about lead scoring and how to create a lead-scoring strategy for your business.    

Importance of Lead Scoring

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Once your business has matured and reached the stage where you receive a good number of leads per week, implementing the lead-scoring method helps increase the conversion rate. Following your lead at each step of the funnel helps to analyze their behavior and optimize the conversion rate.

You must grab the attention of your leads through various content like follow-up emails. Lead scoring will allow you to identify and prioritize highly qualified potential leads and personalize marketing and sales strategies according to that. 

The process will help trigger the act of purchase and convince the leads that your business is the right solution for them. The lead scoring method will help you distinguish your sales-qualified leads from marketing-qualified leads based on the warmth of your leads.

It will determine how the sales team should interact with both types of leads. Convincing the marketing-qualified leads for sale at an early stage would scare them off and take away their trust in your brand.

Benefits of Lead Scoring

Following are some of the benefits of lead scoring:

High conversion rates

Lead scoring allows businesses to prioritize high-quality prospects and focus on them. It enables the creation of personalized campaigns to convert them into your customers. 

Improves sales efficiency

Identifying which leads are ready for sale and which leads you still need to nurture increases your sales efficiency. Reaching out to leads for sale who need more preparation to purchase might scare them away; those leads might need more time nurturing through email or other content.

Increased marketing campaign effectiveness

Lead scoring helps businesses understand which leads are where at the sale funnel. Companies can create personalized marketing campaigns and use marketing automation to generate more sales.

Better ROI on leads

Lead scoring clearly defines which leads are sales-ready prospects and which are still marketing-ready prospects. As per research, 80% of respondents believe misalignment of sales and marketing badly impacts revenue. It creates a better alignment between sales and marketing. It results in better ROI on leads by creating targeted campaigns for leads.

Types of Lead Scoring Models

As the business grows and receives lots of traffic, lead qualification and management should be essential to the sales process. Lead scoring is one such process that helps the sales team close more deals. Here are two lead score models that help businesses with the process.

#1. Rule-based

The rule-based lead scoring model allows setting up rules for ranking leads based on their characteristics. It uses data and behavioral attributes to set up those rules. Types of data used by this method are Individual Data, Demographic data, Technographic data, Firmographic data, and Behavioral data. It is a simple method of lead scoring and the most commonly used model.  

#2. Predictive

Predictive lead scoring leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to create data-driven techniques to rank potential leads. It doesn’t rely on manual methods to define lead qualification criteria and assign scores. This method uses historical data on prospects to create a lead-scoring system. 

The benefits of predictive lead scoring are:

• Improved quality of leads and increased lead generation
• Better alignment of sales and marketing
• Increased conversion leads
• Better resource optimization and cost-effectiveness

Various types of data that this model uses are Demographic data, Behavioral data, Firmographic data, Technographic data, Historical data, Psychographic data, and more. The predictive model not only identifies high-value prospects but also understands them.  

How to Create Lead Scoring Setup

You can create a lead scoring setup in the following three steps:

#1. Identify ideal leads

The first step is to understand and identify ideal leads for your business. One way is to list out the characteristics of your high-quality current customers. If you are a new business, you can take a target customer profile and start from there.

To identify your target customer, ask the following questions:

• What problem is my company solving?
• Who is facing those problems and can engage with the company?
• Who has purchased it?
• Who still needs to buy it?

You can go deeper to identify your target market and go from static demographics to user behavior.  

#2. Define qualification criteria

The next step is to define qualification criteria and a lead-scoring point system for each activity. You should define criteria for when your prospects would be qualified as quality leads. 

Here are some factors that can define lead qualification criteria:

• Customer potential size
• Job title and income/revenue
• Location
• Past purchases
• Email interaction
• No. of website visits, etc

After clearly defining the criteria, the next step is assigning scores to each activity. For instance:

Submitting a form might give 5 points to a lead, opening an email would give 1 point, and visiting a website page more than 10 times would give 10 points.    

#3. Choose lead-scoring software

Lead scoring software will help you save time by automating the lead scoring process. Choose the software that matches your business needs and allow multiple lead-scoring models. An ideal lead scoring software analyzes various data to assign scores, schedules follow-ups, and updates scores regularly as new lead activity is recorded.

Lead nurturing and its role in the Lead Scoring process

Lead nurturing is a tool in marketing campaigns to encourage a lead to move ahead in the sales funnel. It involves engaging and building a relationship with leads. Lead nurturing includes providing personalized content and experiences that help businesses close deals.

Applying lead scoring techniques with lead nurturing allows businesses to target their potential customers at their current stage in the sales process. It increases conversion rate and ROI.

Tips and strategies for nurturing leads 

Here are tips and strategies for nurturing leads:

• Clearly define your target audience
• Create a detailed journey of your customer
• Establish goals for your lead nurturing strategy
• Develop personalized and helpful content
• Choose communication channels to nurture leads
• Implement a lead-scoring system
• Monitor, analyze, and improve lead nurturing and lead scoring system

Following are some of the best lead-scoring tools available in the market:

#1. HubSpot Predictive Lead Scoring

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HubSpot Predictive Lead Scoring is an amazing lead-scoring tool that allows businesses to regularly check lead score dashboards and identify high-priority leads. It helps companies to optimize their sales funnel, increase conversion rate, and generate more revenue.    

Key Features:

• HubSpot provides a data-driven platform to analyze and prioritize leads by automating the whole process, thus saving time.
• It allows scheduling follow-ups, helping the sales team to convert more. 
• It uses machine learning to create a self-optimized lead-scoring system. 
• The software dives deep into data to qualify and assign scores to leads in 25 various ways.

You can use traditional and predictive methods with the HubSpot lead scoring system. It allows the creation of new lead-scoring criteria based on data from forms and other lead activities. 

#2. EngageBay Lead Scoring

EngageBay Lead Scoring is one of the popular lead-scoring tools to identify highly qualified potential customers, analyze them, and track their engagement. It automates the whole process and predicts who and when to send a follow-up.

Key Features:

• EngageBay provides a powerful predictive lead-scoring system to improve conversions.
• It provides free automation tools and customization to assign scores to leads based on their actions.
• It allows various lead scoring methods, such as by location, response, or other parameters.
• The software allows scoring for deals and sets conditions for each sales funnel step.

The platform helps businesses improve retention by sending cold emails and calls and tracking the response and activity of every lead.

#3. Outfunnel Lead Scoring

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Outfunnel Lead Scoring is a lead-scoring software that helps businesses identify high-priority leads and contact them to trigger sales. Setting up a lead scoring system with the funnel is quick and easy and can be done within 15 minutes.

Key Features:

• It analyzes sales and marketing data to identify qualified leads and assign scores.
• It allows scheduling follow-ups automatically based on lead scores.
• It allows integration with CRM tools like HubSpot and Salesforce and email platforms like MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, etc.

The software analyzes how the customer interacts with the business, like web visits, email events, pricing page visits, etc. It uses data from CRM platforms as well to score leads.

#4. Pipedrive Score CRM

Pipedrive Score CRM helps businesses to qualify leads based on key attributes and customer behavior so that you can take the right steps to convert them. It provides add-on applications to integrate with your CRM software, such as Web Visitors, Adinton, Salespanel, and GetQuantity.

Key Features:

• It provides contact info instantly by analyzing web data.
• It allows prioritizing leads and building custom marketing or sales strategies for them based on what stage they are in the buying cycle.
• The tool automates various tasks such as email triggers, follow-ups, etc.
• It enables businesses to manage leads effectively to improve conversion rates.
• It sends real-time notifications to the sales team after identifying hot leads.

The platform provides a real-time sales process overview and helps businesses track deals, solve problems, and improve sales strategy.

#5. Freshsales Lead Scoring System

Freshsales Lead Scoring System is a great tool to identify and sort promising leads and close more deals. It is a great tool to increase the efficiency of sales time and saves time, allowing them to work on more priority sales tasks.

Key Features:

• It allows customizing criteria to assign scores to leads as per your company requirements.
• It allows identifying and assigning scores based on lead property and interactions.
• It updates the lead score each time a new activity is recorded, such as opening an email, visiting a website, etc. 
• It helps reduce the churn rate by identifying and notifying the team early.

Freshsales provides filtering, quickly scores leads based on their scores, contacts the best leads, and sends personalized bulk emails.

Lead Scoring Challenges and Solutions

Following are some of the challenges a business can face while implementing a lead scoring system:

Challenge: Failing to define lead qualification characteristics. 

Solution: The sales and marketing teams should initially determine and agree upon the characteristics.

Challenge: Not knowing the complete buyer’s journey

Solution: All buyer’s journeys are different and can’t be documented by predicting a general linear journey. Lead scoring software uses real-time data of leads to track their journey and document it.

Challenge: Difficulty in implementing or maintaining lead-scoring solutions

Solution: Sales and marketing teams should discuss and set up rules to implement and improve lead scoring. The system should be implemented so that it can evolve with time and as the market changes.

Challenge: Inability to score all leads

Solution: This happens due to the inability to gather data from websites, emails, phone calls, or other mediums. Using a lead scoring platform with CRM integrates with social media, email platforms, and other mediums to capture real-time data and score every lead.

Challenge: Using one scoring system 

Solution: A business can have various products and services, and using only one scoring system can be inefficient. Discuss with your sales and marketing teams and create a scoring system for every product or service.

Case Studies

Let’s discuss with an example how a company can implement lead scoring. We will see a journey of lead and how the score is assigned as it goes through different sales funnel stages. It is a basic example of lead scoring; businesses use lead-scoring platforms that use a data-driven approach.

Company: A SaaS B2B company that sells software products to businesses, helping them increase sales through lead scoring.  

Target Audience: Sales Managers, CEOs, and Leaders of businesses looking for a tool to help them identify and prioritize leads.  

Qualification Criteria: The lead score should be a minimum of 65.

Here’s how the score is assigned to a lead:

Lead Activity	Score per activity	Score
The prospect visits the company website	+15	15
Sign up for a demo or fill out the contact form	+20	35
Subscribes to newsletter	+10	45
Attended the demo session	+15	60
Visits pricing page 10 or more times	+10	70
Unsubscribes newsletter	-5	65
Lead Score		65

As the lead score is 65, the business can now prioritize the lead to initiate a sales campaign to convert the lead into a customer.

FAQs

Wrapping Up

A lead scoring system is an ideal and proven method to improve funnel efficiency and effectiveness of sales strategy. It allows businesses to increase engagement with the right prospects and target them when they are hot and ready to purchase. However, more than just scoring leads are needed to enjoy the benefits.

You need software that automates identifying and prioritizing leads by analyzing data, nurturing leads based on their score, and engaging with them in a personalized and effective manner. There are multiple sales funnel tools that provide lead-scoring features. Using the tool, you can track your lead’s journey and create customized sales campaigns to increase conversion rates.