How Can Lead Scoring Help My Business?

Have you ever wished for a crystal ball that would show your team which prospects were most ready to buy? It’s easy for salespeople to get overwhelmed and frustrated if they’re trying to hunt down every lead, regardless of how warm, cold, or indifferent. Luckily, there’s a solution that can help you prioritize the leads to make the most efficient use of your time and help you close more deals: lead scoring.

Lead Scoring 101
Lead scoring automatically attaches a numerical value to various actions your prospects take. For example, a prospect receives a score for visiting your website, opening an email, downloading an eBook, or filling out a Contact Us form.

Each prospect’s score will be different, since it’s based on how they interact with your website, emails, and content. Prospects with lower scores are likely just beginning their buying journey, educating themselves about your company, products, and industry. Conversely, those with higher scores are likely closer to a purchasing decision. Scoring leads is an effective lead management tactic.

How Scoring Helps Small Businesses
The biggest benefit of lead scoring is that it frees up your sales team to spend more time with the prospects who are most ready to buy. They can allocate more time to in-depth conversations with truly interested prospects, while adding less ready prospects to educational lead nurture sequences.

Another benefit is that it allows you more insight into your customers’ preferred buying journey. For example, your team may notice that a disproportionately high number of closed deals attended a particular webinar that you hosted. This illustrates the importance of adding more webinars to your marketing calendar.

You may also begin to see that various sources of leads produce better prospects for your business. For example, your PPC leads may convert at a considerably higher (or faster) rates than event leads, or vice versa. These discoveries help you make more efficient use of your budget, your planned initiatives, and your time. The proof is ALWAYS in the numbers.

In a recent study conducted by Oracle, organizations using lead scoring systems improved close rates by 30%, increased company revenue by 18%, and increased revenue per deal by 17%.

Taking Scoring to the Next Level
The real power is unleashed when you combine lead scoring models with marketing automation workflows.

Automations are actions that take place after a trigger is activated. A trigger kicks off the automation, and could be something like a submitted form, an email open or click, or a tag applied to a contact.

Consider all of the prospects that may not be ready to buy yet. You could add them to a marketing list that triggers a nurture automation. Over the course of several weeks, these prospects will receive a sampling of your best content, with occasional invitations from your sales team sprinkled in. Finally, a task assigning their sales rep to call them and check in will be automatically created.

Once you’ve taken the time to build this automation once, your prospects (and sales team) benefit over and over. Even though your salesperson hasn’t taken any time out of his schedule to follow up with the prospect, the prospect feels like they’ve been having an on-going conversation with a team member. The salesperson’s list of tasks is automatically updated, so that each day they can prioritize hot leads, well-nurtured follow-ups, and most importantly – closing deals.

How to Assign Scores
Let’s dive into the nitty-gritty: how do you set up a scoring system that works for you?

This depends somewhat on which marketing automation solution you select to enable this process. There’s some variance as to what scoring factors are supported and how much you’re able to customize the scoring. Take a look at our example below which features Infusionsoft but the basic tenets apply regardless of which solution you choose.

Setting Up the Basics
The first step is building your default scores. In many marketing automation systems, the lead scoring model example below comes default with many automation vendors.

Lead scoring assignment in InfusionSoft platform

For example, in your business, perhaps Email Opens are just as valuable as Email Clicks.

Note: In order for Website Visits and Page Views to be able to add points, you’ll need to embed the tracking code on your website.

Custom Lead Scoring
Basic lead scoring is a great start, but you can take it even further with your own lead scoring methodology. You’re the expert on your business, so you know best which form submissions and campaign responses are most valuable for your business.

Perhaps a “Free Trial” or “Request Demo” form submission is more likely to become a customer than a “Contact Us” submission. Custom lead scoring allows you to weight the scored value of those form submissions and campaign responses accordingly.

Custom lead scoring in the Automational platform

In Automational, you would do this using the Update Field action. The Update Field action allows you to increase or decrease lead score by the increment of your choosing, and can be added to any automation. Consider adding it to your Contact Us automation, since Contact Us forms are generally more interested than, say, content downloaders.

You could also add it to specific nurture sequences, or after the sale, to mark when a contact completes an important Welcome or Onboarding sequence. The possibilities are endless!

If you need help picking out a marketing automation vendor with a customizable lead scoring system or you want help with figuring out the best way to set yours up, schedule a call with our team.