Lead scoring guidelines – learn to prioritize

It is easy to underestimate the complexity of marketing. Most people believe that a marketer’s sole responsibility is to create interesting advertisements. While this is an important part of their job, marketing professionals must also generate leads and look for potential new clients. Lead generation is arguably the most important job of a marketer. However, marketers oftentimes, have so many leads that it is impossible to follow up on all of them. This puts them in a position where they are forced to pick one lead over another. Having said that, there is a way to make the process of selecting leads much easier. This is known as lead scoring. If you wish to learn how to use this method to its full potential, we are here to help. We are going to talk about some of the lead scoring guidelines.

What exactly is lead scoring?

Most marketing and sales groups use Lead scores in order to have a better understanding of how close a prospective customer is to converting into a customer. This system works by awarding points to prospective customers who are moving through the sales funnel, based on a few different factors. Some of the factors that lead scoring takes into account are age, gender, ethnicity, and place of living. However, it also follows the buying habits, content they consume as well as email clicks of potential customers. The point-based lead scoring approach establishes a threshold for leads to meet, and once they do, they qualify as strong leads for the sales team.

Five lead scoring guidelines that you should follow

Knowing when to contact a prospect allows sales teams to be more focused, informed, and efficient when interacting with potential clients. This allows businesses to focus on the customers that are less likely to make a purchase. If you do not use lead scoring, you risk advertising to people who are only waiting to make a purchase. In order to maximize profit, you need to convert completely new customers. If you find it difficult to convert newer customers, there is lead engagement software that can help you with that.

1. Establish customer/client profiles

Creating detailed profiles of your potential customers or clients will assist your marketing team with lead generation as well as lead scoring. Customer profiles are made-up but accurate representations of a company’s target audience. These profiles should be used by your sales team to determine which of your potential prospects best fits the description. This allows them to concentrate all of their marketing efforts on them. With this knowledge, your sales or marketing team can assign more points or take away points from potential customers depending on the way they interact with your marketing material. Some of the attributes that you should include in your customer profiles are:

1. Expected income
2. Industry in which they work
3. In what department
4. Seniority
5. Where they live

2. Include negative attributes in customer profiles

If you do not include negative attributes in your customer profiles, your conversion rate will suffer. This is because you only want to market and remarket to potential clients who are likely to convert. Positive attributes alone will give the impression that the majority of your prospective clients are on their way to conversion. However, in order to ensure that this is the case, you must include a controlling factor, negative attributes. This would include characteristics that are diametrically opposed to those of your ideal customer profile. Sales and marketing teams can use negative ratings to determine which leads are good and when to contact them. If you integrate this into your system, you will be able to boost web lead conversions by a large amount.

3. Identify lead scoring degradation

When determining the quality of the leads that could become customers, you must also take into consideration the amount of time that has passed. If you don’t factor in the passage of time, you run the risk of forming an inaccurate picture of where exactly in the sales funnel your customers currently stand. The less interaction your potential customers have with your businesses, the greater the likelihood that they are no longer interested in what it is that you have to offer them.

Potential customers who interact regularly, on the other hand, are more likely to be converted via callback software. It doesn’t matter how high the lead score of a potential client is if they no longer visit your website. If they don’t engage with your marketing material anymore, you should allocate your resources elsewhere. In this case, the lead score is completely useless. That is why it would help if you had a score degradation system. This way, you can identify if some of your potential customers have slowed down, or stopped going down your sales funnel.

4. Review lead scoring models on a regular basis

No matter how successful your lead scoring system is working, you can never be sure if you are making the most of it. Lead scoring can be volatile and for that reason, you need to keep track of it at all times. You can decide on a general time frame for checking your lead scoring model.

For example, once every quarter you can have a meeting with your marketing team to look over the performance of your lead scoring model. This way you can be sure that everything is working according to plan. However, if you notice that your potential leads are not converting as quickly as you have planned, you can lower the time in between reviews.

5. Listen to your customers

Most business owners and marketers don’t communicate with people directly. This is unfortunate because there is no one who can give you a better idea of how to set up your lead scoring model than they can. For this reason, you should try to extract as much information from your customers as possible. Create surveys, forms, and questions for all of your prospective customers as well as those who you already converted. With the help of these lead scoring guidelines, you will learn to prioritize the important leads over those that are not here to stay.