Lead Scoring In Inbound Marketing

According to MarketingSherpa’s B2B Benchmarking Report, only 21% of B2B marketers have established a lead scoring program.

Inbound Marketing* is lauded for its ability to attract a high volume of leads, but distinguishing between visitors who are just looking around and quality leads likely to become customers is a challenge Inbound marketers are facing.

Lead scoring allows you to manage your leads and attach a value of ‘sales-readiness’ to each lead based on their personal information and behavior patterns on your website.

This allows the Inbound marketer to determine if they are ready to talk to a sales personnel, and thus bridges the gap between the marketing team and the sales team to work towards converting the lead into a customer.

STEP 1: First, determine if you need Lead Scoring.

There are a few criteria that you have to consider before thinking about using lead scoring. It’s not essential for every business, and in some cases you’ll be wasting your own time.

• Is your sales team being given enough leads to begin with? If not, you should focus on getting more leads rather than be concerned with lead scoring.

• Is your sales team complaining about bad leads (leads with a low conversion rate)? Lead scoring becomes useful here since there is not enough information to determine how sales-ready the leads are.

• Do you have sufficient information about your leads? Information such as the leads’ position in their companies or their level of activity on your website helps to profile the leads and in turn determine their sales-readiness. Without this information, both marketers and salespeople are merely guessing how warm the leads are and it just does not work that way.

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STEP 2: You’ll need to decide what makes a lead ‘good’.

Discuss this with your sales team and base this decision on known contact information and consumer patterns. The main factor to take into account is how much the lead engages with your website, such as how much content they download, or how many pages they have viewed, etc.

Apart from the website activity levels exhibited by your leads, other things to look at include:

• Role in company
• Company size
• Industry

STEP 3: Set the points for every visitor action.

Once you have figured out your ideal customer, create a scale of points for your leads, such as a scale of 0 to 100. The points themselves are arbitrary, so there must be consensus among all marketing and sales staff how many points should be assigned according to the significance/weightage of an action. A series of actions by a visitor should add up the points to a total score that is high enough to indicate a level of sales-readiness. The sales team will know it is time to make a move towards engaging such visitors.

Lead Scoring maximizes marketing efficiency as your marketing or sales team knows when to start reaching out to the lead, how much and what type content to offer the lead, and whether or not the lead is worth pursuing.

Is your website capturing enough leads? Are your leads eager to read what you have to say next? Allow us to give you a FREE assessment of your website performance so you know how to apply improvement tips after a call. You have nothing to lose!

* Inbound marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves SEO, Social Media, blog and landing pages to generate sales leads.

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