Create a Lead Scoring Process to Enhance Your Sales

A lead scoring strategy is one of the best ways for marketing and sales teams to synchronize and optimize the lead management process. B2B companies have an increasing availability of marketing platforms, so there is really no justification of ignore the opportunities available through lead scoring. Lead scoring is the method of assigning a score to lead behavior on the basis of a certain criteria. Fundamentally the lead scoring is on the basis of the likelihood of a lead purchasing your product. Leads scoring as a process helps businesses make crucial decisions.

Significance of Lead Scoring

Lead scoring usually assigns a point value to every action that a prospect makes on the site. These result in a score being allotted to the prospects based on activities, web pages browsed or links clicked. A prospect is assigned to the sales team, after being viewed and scored by the marketing team. On the basis of the lead score, the sales team has an indication of the prospect’s interest. It is also beneficial to the sales and the marketing automation department as it points to where prospects come from and how they interact within your site.

How to create a successful lead scoring process to enhance your sales
For an enterprise in its pursuit to collect and nurture new leads, automated lead scoring techniques work wonders.  If you are looking at ways to optimize your current strategy, these are a few tips that can work.

• Collaboration between sales and marketing

The friction between your sales and marketing teams can be lessened with lead scoring. A brilliant way of ensuring that the process is performing to the satisfaction of all the teams is the involvement of the sales teams in the lead scoring process from the get-go.

• Simplify the lead scoring process

Decide which fields are required and which are optional when you set up your process. By keeping minimal and consistent across forms throughout your website ensures that the leads are compared on the same data. Choosing lead scoring criteria that can be constantly measured is the best way of keeping your lead scoring system manageable.

• Choose the BANT criteria

Execute BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing) data for your preliminary assessments, if you’re just starting out with lead scoring.

• Determine lead value on explicit and implicit data

The value of the lead can be determined on the information that is available on the leads. Explicit data is that which is volunteered when a visitor fills out a web form and interacts with your sales or marketing teams. Implicit data is gathered based on the visitor’s interactions on your website. You can have a comprehensive view of the lead’s interest depending on how you evaluate leads based on both the types of data.

• Score on the basis of frequency

It is important to score your leads on the basis of timing. An important factor in gauging a leads' engagement level, is the frequency of the lead visits and how recently they’ve interacted with your website.
Once the lead scoring strategy is implemented, it is vital that leads who don’t meet the meet the criteria you’ve laid out are not sent to the sales teams. Leads that are not ready need to be nurtured, as lead nurturing is an also essential aspect of your lead management process. With a successful lead scoring process, your sales can reach great heights.

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Time to Get Started on Lead Scoring to Prioritize Your Sales Leads

Marketing teams are usually faced with challenges pertaining to leads as they need to identify only those leads that can bring forth the best opportunities for their sales teams. Therefore qualification of leads is crucial to all sales teams’ effectiveness and success. Automated lead scoring techniques also work wonders for an enterprise in its pursuit to collect and nurture new leads. If you're just getting started with lead scoring, here are a few tips to get you on your way.

• Ensure that the lead score encapsulates both online and offline activity

To get a complete and accurate picture, it is important for a lead score to take in the online as well as the offline activity. It is therefore imperative to ensure that inbound calls and other offline behaviors that are integral to the buyer’s process are fully integrated into the scoring methodology.

• Expect changes in the scoring model

It is necessary to examine historical data and look for correlations that exist. It is only through continuous experimentation and monitoring that your lead model will mature.

• Re-evaluate the lead score data continuously

It is important to automatically add new data as it is gathered over time and re-score leads. To maintain accurate scores, it is necessary to constantly re-assess and update the data.

• A low score is not a low value lead

 Low lead scores indicate that a person is early in their buying process. A low score has the potential to develop over time, so don’t discard it.

It is important to start simple and tweak the programs, your scores, and the metrics that are being looked at to analyze the scores of the leads. The actual score, of course, does not matter. What matters more is that the higher the score, the more actionable the lead is. The right kind of lead scoring solution can ensure that leads are automatically stored and prioritized. It makes it easier for sales teams to discriminate between leads that may be sales ready and those that may not be.

Lead Scoring is the process of assigning a quantitative qualification to prospects on the basis of their behavior and potential of making a purchase in a given time. So lead scoring is basically the process of separating qualified, sales ready leads in an automated fashion into two parts – their behavior and their demographics. With optimized B2B lead scoring methods, companies can easily prioritize sales leads, gauge the level of interest of the website and provide answers about the Intent behind visitors’ actions.



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automated lead scoring,  lead management system

Lead Scoring in 2011

Did you know that marketing budgets for marketing automation saw an increase from 6.4% of marketing budgets in 2010 to 6.9% in 2011? Enterprises have realized that with complicated marketing strategies and global recession, marketing automation tools can be more effective in grasping the complexities of marketing campaigns and can therefore offer solutions to solve these complexities. Marketing automation tools can equip enterprises with a cost effective way of ensuring marketing operational efficiency. When conventional and expensive marketing initiatives have failed, it has been the newer marketing elements that need to be focused upon. One such marketing automation element is lead scoring. Very simply put, lead scoring is the process of ranking and getting leads prioritized according to some pre-defined parameters.


Lead Scoring in 2011 - The Road Ahead

Lead scoring can assist enterprises in understanding the interests of their website visitors. Also the intent of these visitors can be ascertained. Often enterprises are plagued with questions about the intent behind a particular prospect’s website visit or about the actual reason behind the 11 will emphasize the ability to grasp the prospect’s intent correctly. Only then can marketing and sales teams take lead score results seriously and also take necessary and suitable action. Also the year will see sales leads scoring engaging more intensely in the analytical aspect of understanding the intent of prospects, which will further help marketing and sales teams to strategize and ideate better on their marketing campaigns. The social media bandwagon will continue to create an impact and it will have some impact on lead scoring techniques as well.

With automated lead scoring methodologies available, enterprises can be assured of better synthesis and communication between their sales and marketing teams. Therefore there will no longer be a sales and marketing teams working as separate teams, rather they will function and work together. 2011 will ensure that lead scoring techniques offer better direction towards the allocation of capital to the right kind of leads rather than focusing on prospects that may yield no profits for the enterprise. Targeted leads, when nurtured, will offer more profits and revenues to the enterprise, and this year will definitely be witness to enterprises enjoying such scenarios.

2011 could very well be the year when enterprises see the economical yet amazingly rewarding aspects of automated lead scoring techniques.

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Lead nurturing, lead management, marketing automation solutions

How to Improve Your Lead Management Process

How to Improve Your Lead Management Process

Capturing and nurturing a customer’s interest is of prime importance because it is the impetus for whether a product is actually purchased or not. The sole intent of lead management is to build a relationship with each prospective customer in a way that their interest develops into an opportunity for sales. The goal, however, always remains the same - ensuring complete customer satisfaction by marketing automation.

One of the most fundamental processes that is required for an increase in revenue is a periodic review of the lead management program. As prospective leads originate in a variety of different ways, there is usually only a very loose structure in place to manage all those leads. Lead management system begins with the ability to hit revenue targets in your sales pipeline. By adopting the following strategies you can improve your lead management efforts.

• Specifically define a lead so all employees understand it.

The definition of a lead is one of the biggest disconnects between sales and the rest of the company. Most of the leads that are sent to the sales team are never acted upon. This usually happens when the lead is either not routed through the right person or isn’t ready to engage with the sales person. For sales effectiveness, the sales staff and the rest of the company need a specific definition of when a prospect becomes an actual lead and when it needs to be forwarded to the sales team.

• Trail the lead source.

It is necessary to keep track of where a prospective lead originated so that you can better determine what works and what doesn’t, as most people hear about a company and its services through ads or referrals. Keeping track of a source helps determine how many times a customer needs to be contacted and what methods of contact work best. By not capturing a source, there is no way of figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

• Allocate leads quickly.

Studies have proven that the sales closing rate increases tremendously if a prospect is contacted within 48 hours. Quick response sets you apart from the other competitors in the market. This can be tracked as a key sales metric.

• Implement Lead Nurturing.

Lead nurturing best practices call for nurturing of leads. Most prospective leads are not converted to a sale after the very first interaction with the salesperson. It is necessary to develop campaigns that facilitate the interaction with prospects numerous times so that they can be moved from the sales cycle until they are actually ready to make a purchase.
Any marketing organization will be on its way to optimizing lead generation, maximizing sales revenue, and improving marketing results by implementing these key strategies of lead management.

Know more - b2b lead scoring, lead nurturing definition