Lead Scoring: what it is and how to do it

Lead Scoring is a technique that will help you optimize the capture of your leads and optimize your company’s sales.

Useful Contents

Because, through Lead Scoring you can identify which leads have the greatest potential to close a purchase. Thus allowing you to implement strategies to capture these leads or make your customers buy from you again.The Leading Score plays a fundamental role for those who work with sales, and using this strategy can bring numerous advantages.In this article we will explain what Lead Scoring is, how to do it and what tools are needed to use this strategy.

What is Lead Scoring?

As mentioned before, Lead Scoring allows you to identify which leads have the greatest buying potential.That’s because Lead Scoring is a methodology where a score is assigned to each lead, based on their profile. Through this score it is possible to identify which are the hot leads, those that are closer to closing a purchase. The better the Lead’s score, the closer it is to advancing in the sales funnel. This score can vary from company to company, and generally companies tend to classify their leads based on the terms “hot”, “warm” and “cold”, where “hot” are the best leads. Or based on rankings “A”, “B”, “C” and “D”, where A is the best ranking.To assign these scores, it is necessary to analyze the profile of this lead and identify how close it is to the ideal customer profile.The ideal customer profile is widely used among companies, as it describes a consumer who has a greater chance of successfully purchasing your product or service.Through your company’s ideal customer profile, you can make a comparison with the lead profiles in order to identify those who should receive a higher or lower score. Therefore, if you want to use Lead Scoring within your company, it is essential that you already have an ideal customer profile. In addition to the lead profile, you can also assign a score based on recent activities performed by that lead, such as downloading rich materials, registration in Landing Pages, etc…Thus, both the marketing and sales teams must work together during the lead qualification process.

Advantages of carrying out Lead Scoring

You can already imagine that with Lead Scoring it is much easier to define which are the best strategies to capture your leads.And that fact can give them many advantages, such as:

More efficient teams

With the focus on your marketing team and also on your sales team, Lead Scoring has great potential to increase the efficiency of these teams.This is because lead analysis becomes faster and more objective.And segmenting these leads based on scores helps ensure that only the best leads are delivered to the sales team.Allowing the marketing team to work more focused and intelligent so that the sales team receives better opportunities.So the teams start to work together and for the same purpose.

Cost decrease

Investing in Lead Scoring makes your company invest less during sales and marketing campaigns. With more qualified leads reaching the sales team, they are likely to achieve a higher conversion rate in less time.The acquisition cost per customer is lower, and your company saves more.

More effective strategies

By evaluating which leads are closer to converting into customers, the marketing team can use strategies to attract these leads or optimize their current strategies.Thus, it is also possible for the team to be able to assess which were the strategies that obtained the highest return. It is possible to use content marketing during this evaluation, in addition to creating email marketing and landing pages.

How to do a Lead Scoring?

If you’ve come this far and are interested in applying Lead Scoring to your company, know that any company can use Lead Scoring to improve and optimize its strategies.However, the company needs to implement a functional Inbound Marketing strategy that is generating leads for its business. Now that you know what the main requirement is to implement this strategy, let’s learn how to put it into practice. Check:

Define the model

There are several ways to do Lead Scoring, each one of them involves a different cost and complexity. The choice is personal, and also depends on how much you want to invest, but be aware that the results can also be less accurate. The Lead Scoring models are: Manual: Generates a lot of manual work and does not offer standardization. The lead qualification process is carried out by just one person, this professional evaluates the profile of the customers he thinks have the greatest potential and transfers them to the sales team.

Semi-automatic: It is based on data collection or on spreadsheets, reducing the work of the marketing team.

Automatic and simple: Tools are used that provide a note for the lead, however this note can be ambiguous, making it difficult to choose which lead to approach first.

Automatic and complete: Automated tools that provide two different grades, criteria and weights, based on the results already obtained.

Automatic and predictive: It analyzes a series of information and defines the criteria and weights automatically.

Let’s approach the manual methodology, so that you understand each step of this process. And also because there are several tools available on the market, and each one has its own system and it would be impossible to cover all of them.

Define the ideal customer profile

If you don’t already have a defined ideal customer profile, you can look at your current customers and then identify what the main characteristics of these customers are. To help you, you can ask questions like: What location are these customers located?

Do they occupy the position where they work?

What are the types of companies that buy your products ? Who owns the purchase decision in this company?

What are the difficulties they face on a daily basis?

But don’t limit yourself to just these questions, remember that the more information the better. And that from now on you can outline your ideal customer profile.

Analyze the profile of your leads

You need to identify some characteristics in the profile of your leads, then compare them with your ideal profile and then assign them a score. Before that, divide your evaluation into two types of main data groups, choose at least 4 categories from each of them to evaluate:

) Demographic data (explicit score): information such as age, position held, company segment, location, number of company employees, company revenue, among others.

Behavioral data (implicit score): what materials they downloaded and from which stage of the funnel, emails they received, how long ago relates to your company, etc. Initially, you can define equal weights for each of the criteria, but later it is necessary to refine the weights and add more characteristics.Remember that if you are using automatic, it is possible that you need to register your lead and indicate what criteria you have defined.

Define who your qualified leads are

At this point it is time for the marketing and sales teams to define what they consider a qualified marketing lead (MQL) and what they consider a qualified sales lead (SQL). Marketing leads are those that are not yet ready to be transferred to the sales team, and still need some preparation or action such as remarketing, for example. While qualified sales leads are ready to go through the sales team. In addition to allowing you to be more assertive, defining these two groups makes it easier when you assign a score to them.

Determine activation score

The activation score is based on how many interactions your lead made with you, so you determine a minimum value for that lead to advance in the sales funnel. So it goes from MQL to SQL, this score must be defined together with the marketing and sales teams in order to better evaluate the strategies for capturing this lead.

Refine your strategy

Now you already have the potential to identify which customers your sales team can contact.There is no standardization in this strategy, so there is a constant need for it to be reworked and optimized based on your experiences. Therefore, it is necessary to maintain the joint work of the sales and marketing teams, so that they can work on optimizing Lead Scoring. Perform analysis, and collect feedback to find out what in your strategy is working, so you will have better results. Still based on the scores, it is possible to perform some actions such as:

Leads that have a good demographic profile and many interactions: are sent directly to the sales team.

Leads with a good profile, but who still don’t have many interactions: it is necessary to use some marketing strategies to attract them . Leads with a bad profile and a lot of interest: don’t waste your time investing in these leads.

Leads with a bad profile and little interest: try to sell to them, but don’t invest too much.

5 CRM Tools to facilitate your Lead Scoring

1. SendinBlue

It is a platform that offers several features, from landing pages to marketing automation and also CRM to contribute to the organization and also the growth of your company.

two. pipedrive

Pipedrive is a customer relationship management CRM solution, works as an account manager to assist with marketing and the entire sales process.

3. Freshworks

Freshworks CRM acts as a single source of truth for your business and provides a comprehensive view of your customer, capturing and matching the customer with your marketing strategies.

4. RD Station

RD Station Marketing is a software that helps your company to carry out better campaigns, foster leads, generate opportunities qualified business ages and achieve more results. From social media to email, landing pages, popups and even automations and analytics.

5. Plooms

Ploomes is a sales platform focused on portfolio management, sales funnel, proposal automation and management dashboards.

Avoid the main mistakes when using Lead Scoring

You already know how to do your Lead Scoring, but you also need to be attentive to avoid the main mistakes that can happen during the application of your Lead Scoring.

Watch out for variables

When you categorize the profile of your customers, it is recommended not to use too many variables, as they can hinder rather than help and keep you away from the real score. Then define only the most relevant ones for your strategy, and be careful when assigning a value to them. It may take some time to align the score with the characteristics, but remember that they are an important step in this process.

Avoid using only the manual method

Even if the manual method seems more profitable, imagine that the professional who performs the data collection will have to deal with many spreadsheets of different leads.Dealing with a large volume of data can be a difficult task, even more so when it comes to such an important process within the company. In addition, this professional will probably use arbitrary data to define which leads will be transferred to the sales team. With marketing becoming more and more analytical, running a relevant process manually should be reconsidered. Even more so when there is a wide availability of tools on the market, as is the case with the tools we mentioned in the previous topic.

Do not perform the service

Let’s say your team collected lead scores, now what?Well, it’s time to work on those leads and that score, because collecting the data is just the basis for you to apply the strategies in order to generate more conversions. But don’t worry if you’re still in doubt about how to optimize your Lead Scoring, as we’ve separated a series of important steps for you to observe within your strategy.

How to optimize your Lead Scoring?

We mentioned how important it is to optimize your Lead Scoring, but what to do to improve it and how to do it?Check out some important notes:

Be aware of your conversion channels

If you have landing pages, forms or whatever your conversion channel is, based on the scores of the profiles you obtained, you’ve probably already identified whether the communication on these channels is reaching the right audience. Also, remember to keep the questions in line with the information you’ve determined is relevant to building your audience profile. Be sure to update the questions, as well as the content being offered on your page or website. Delete the questions you feel are necessary and include new ones that are more relevant to your Lead Scoring. In addition, when you set up your landing page to capture your leads, give preference to working with predefined fields to facilitate filtering when assigning grades

Map your leads

Track which is the path your leads take within your website, to define whether the page where you sell, in fact, is being accessed.If your leads are showing interest in this page, for example.And also monitor which are the contents that call your lead’s attention the most, that way you can optimize the other pages and adapt the contents.Work to optimize essential pages, those that are part of the buying journey.An example of what each stage of the sales funnel would look like, based on actions within your company’s website: Top of funnel: visit your blog or a landing page. Middle of the funnel: visit the features/benefits page of your product or service.

Bottom of funnel: visit pricing page.

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Identify which materials need improvement

If you offer an ebook, you need to identify which materials convert the most and which stage of the sales funnel this material is in.Well, good material can be used for a lead nurturing strategy or for remarketing. Therefore, always be aware of the materials you make available to your audience.

Perform tests with your Lead Scoring

Be open to testing to identify which are the best strategies, as we mentioned Lead Scoring has no standard. Run tests at each stage of the funnel, with your hot, warm and cold leads, and try to ensure a good conversion strategy.

Ready to do your Lead Scoring?

In this article, we offer you a complete guide to set up your Lead Scoring and also show you the main tools used to help you in this step.Don’t forget to provide your customer with good service on your website and use an online chat so that he can get in touch with the sales team immediately. Access the JivoChat page and learn about the resources that this tool offers so that you can provide quality service. Good sales!