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In an era where online sales are taking over the digital marketing industry. Ecommerce businesses are using various marketing strategies to convert leads and generate revenue. Imagine driving so much traffic only to lose your prospects due to inefficient lead management.
Indeed, not all businesses are aware of lead scoring as a tool used to grade prospects for effective lead conversion. When you look at big brands that engage in sales, they have a team of experts, usually a marketing and a sales team. These teams work together to ensure they convert leads and build loyal customers over time.
It doesn’t matter if you are a growing business; approaches are used to build a brand such that your customer relationship management will sustain your business over time. This is why some companies prioritize lead scoring with agencies like leadiax for lead conversion. This article will give you details on how lead scoring can impact your daily activities, the benefits of lead scoring, and its limitations.
What is Lead Scoring?
This is a process of assigning a score or giving rank to a potential customer until the conversion point. This process is seen in most ecommerce stores because it involves a standardized way of advertising and creating an individual relationship with customers. Conscious follow-up with a potential customer and giving the necessary information through emails, newsletters, telemarketing, etc., until they purchase a product. Converting prospects to loyal customers is the main objective of a lead scoring system.
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Steps to lead scoring system
Lead generation
67% of big companies use lead generation as an essential metric in determining the success of lead scoring. Lead generation is the first step to lead scores, it’s the process of acquiring leads through advertising or sales marketing. Before you start to assign a lead score to potential customer must be reached, and the responses given are used to assign a score value.
Customer Inquiry
Before you can assign a score value to a customer, the customer signals to the sales teams that they are either interested in something being offered or are skeptical about a product before they can make purchases. It is now left for the sales teams to assign value and follow up with these prospects for lead conversion.
Inquiry Filtering
This enables the sales and marketing teams to examine the prospect that qualifies for accuracy. This help businesses get a better understanding of the information received from clients. The sales team uses several methods to filter qualified leads for conversion; they include:
- Distinguish lead qualification criteria by industry, size, and location.
- Check the number of lead sales with positive feedback.
- Recognize prospects actual point values in the purchasing procedure.
- Filter and remove false data of clients with invalid names, addresses and emails.
Lead Grading
This involves placing priority or value on a lead. Prospects with positive sales lead results should be considered first because of the high chance of conversion. At the same time, casual users should be given less value because a potential customer who is not a target audience for a product or service is unlikely to purchase a product. This stage of lead management can be regulated based on demographic information; after verifying a customer profile and assigning a predictive lead scoring, you can now define lead level or company-level information that will tell you if a lead fits your product.
Lead Distribution
Leads that have been qualified will then be distributed to the marketing teams and sales personnel to back up prospects with specific information given. Preference is given to customers with high lead scoring values to convert them into customers quickly. Score leads and distribute according to the customer’s interest; that way, you maximize your lead scoring efforts.
Sales Contact
This sales process requires the sales agent to communicate effectively to encourage prospects to take the right decision. A lead can only respond when they are compelled to; that is why as a sales team, you are supposed to understand customers’ behaviour so you can channel your skill effectively.
Lead Nurturing
Once a lead responds to a sales team, It is now easy to nurture leads using personal follow-ups and an automated style to help convince them of the importance of making the right purchase. Data points are a key component in scoring leads because the information of the prospective customers will serve as lead generation tools for conversion.
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Benefits Of Lead Scoring System
Lead scoring enables you to make decisions regarding buying intent of a prospect and identify high value leads that are likely to convert to improve your market revenue. The following are benefits established after implementing effective lead scoring system:
Increased Revenue
When a sales department of a company focus more on leads that are more likely to convert, it improves sales and generates revenue for the company. No doubt marketing managers prioritize leads and nurture qualified leads by:
- Personalize and target nurtured leads using lead scoring system to drive organic traffic and conversion.
- Utilizing resources based on user engagement to improve productivity and reduce the cost of operation.
Better sales and Marketing Alignment
Lead scoring helps team’s work together to get a final score for the best leads, and they sieve out the negative score with low quality leads. This alignment improves team communication and creates an efficient lead management process. The marketing team hands over leads to the sales team with relevant information to improve sales production.
Lower Market and Cost Acquisition
Focusing on the right marketing strategy, such as route leads, will help you allocate resources more efficiently and lower marketing and acquisition costs. With the help of lead score, the time spent on leads that are not qualified is reduced, and this lowers acquisition costs.
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Sales Results
This is the final stage of the lead scoring process because the lead makes a purchase and impacts the company’s ROI. After this successful conversion, return to sales contact to follow up with other potential customers with the predictive lead score.
Best Lead Scoring Models
Lead scoring model allows the sales reps to evaluate and identify potential leads that are most likely to purchase a product r service of your company. Businesses rely on lead scoring to consistently find potential clients,, which is why these models are essential. Below are lead scoring models that impact a business:
Score Degradation
This model helps you track slow leads; this can be due to no interaction between the lead. You and your company, you can then assign a lower lead score. For example, a client that doesn’t read or respond to your email can harm lead generation. That way, you lower the ranking score and sieve out the chaff. To use score degradation, you need to access the following;
- Decide which actions warrant a point lead score deduction.
- Create a sales report that shows how a score is distributed.
- Consider the pattern and frequency of communication; this will help you know how often a prospect clicks through your website.
- Consider your sales cycle length and qualification method; for example, how does your scoring fit into upsell/cross-sell, etc.
Lead Scoring Threshold
This is when a potential customer is considered sales-ready, or a lead score exceeds the amount; it becomes a sales-qualified lead and passes from marketing to sales. Getting your threshold right will help you qualify premature leads to avoid pursuing prospects who are not ready to convert. Or the risk of spending too much time on valuable leads that competitors can snatch.
To determine your threshold, you should be able to:
- Looking for historical data to know the characteristics to mark as quantified lead.
- Assigning numerical value to lead attribute to determine the threshold based on accumulated score.
- Setting specific requirements that a lead must meet to cross a particular threshold.
- Grouping leads such that their scores are defined for each tier.
- Experimenting with different scoring thresholds to measure the impact on conversion rate.
Explicit Scoring
This involves collecting data directly from customers through surveys or contact forms to assign scores. Using the Lead scoring tool, you can assign points to a lead based on specific characteristics like demographic details: job title, age, gender, industry, location, role, etc. This is a simple way to evaluate leads; other data used for explicit scoring include:
- Firmographics, which is the collection of data on a lead company, like annual revenue and number of employees, to evaluate a prospect
- Lead source such that you assess the quality of the referral, trade show or website form to check whether the lead fits the business.
- Designing questionaries’ for a survey to gather information about the leads pain points,
- Asking the lead about their purchase intent, such as budgets, purchase durations and product requirements.
Alignment Between Marketing and Sales Teams
This model evaluates the connection between lead attributes and the ideal customer profile defined by the marketing team. These teams ensure the targeted leads align with the business market and sales objectives. Lead scoring criteria used for marketing campaigns includes:
- Evaluate customers’ profiles to see how lead matches the scoring criteria to generate leads.
- Assessing the engagement interaction between the lead and the sales and marketing teams while integrating lead scoring.
- Gathering the feedback and rating from the marketers to see if it matches the lead quality.
- Evaluating the stage of leads within sales funnel.
Conclusion
Lead scoring is a step-by-step process requiring critical analysis before achieving success. The final objective is to convert leads into paying customers when executed correctly. It is important for the sales and marketing team to prioritize quality leads and all the leads by assigning actual points to target customers and convert leads.
