Sales and marketing teams use lead scoring to assess the worthiness of leads and future consumers by assigning values to them based on their behavior and interest in their products or services. The “value” of each lead varies for every firm but is typically defined by the level of interest the company generates or its position in the purchasing cycle. The initial aim of companies is to attract sales leads or prospects into their pipeline. But after they’ve collected numerous leads, it’s critical for them to focus on the prospects who are most interested in purchasing. Luckily, this is where lead scoring comes in handy.
- Align Sales and Marketing Teams
A deal desk gives salespeople the information, productivity tools, and guidance they need from the marketing team to cover all of their bases and move customers through the sales cycle. In short, deal desks help ease communication between sales and marketing teams which increases sales efficiency and helps to identify viable leads more quickly. Closing sales is significantly more effective when marketing and sales plans are based on the buyer’s journey and behavioral data. In reality, these days, the great majority of customers want firms to use their data to customize interactions and deliver relevant information. To that end, sales team collaboration is an avenue that cannot be ignored.
- Leverage Negative Scoring and Score Degradation
Many marketers don’t employ even the tiniest amount of lead score degradation. If your leads have done nothing for a specific amount of time, say three months or longer, you may wish to give them a bad score. Also, increasing a lead’s score for certain conduct (downloading a case study, attending a webinar) shouldn’t be permanent. Score inflation can occur if the deterioration of score value is not employed. Similar to the Negative Lead Score, Score Degradation assists firms in identifying substandard Low-intent Leads and focusing on more valuable, High-quality Leads. Businesses must understand which behaviors should cause point degradation in order to benefit from Score Degradation. Reversing the point system used for Implicit Scoring is a typical method used by many firms. If a Lead receives 10 points for signing up for a newsletter, they will lose 10 points if they unsubscribe.
- Determine the Lead Scoring Threshold
The point value at which a prospect is judged Sales-ready is referred to as a Lead Score Threshold. When the Lead Score hits or surpasses this threshold, it is classified as a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) and forwarded to Sales to close the transaction. However, getting the threshold value properly is critical. If it’s too low, and leads are qualified too soon, the sales process becomes considerably more complicated, because the leads aren’t ready to pursue yet. However, if the price is too high, you risk losing the lead to a rival because Sales took too long to reply. If a Lead seeking a product demo is the best predictor of eventual conversion into a sale, the Lead Score Threshold should be set so that every Lead asking for a demo is awarded enough points to become an MQL right away.
- Assign Positive Scores for Customer Actions
Leads who viewed high-value sites (such as price pages) or filled out high-value forms may receive better lead scores (like a demo request). Similarly, you may provide better ratings to leads who have visited your site 30 times rather than three times.A visual approach was utilized by an online marketing and digital advertising agency, to match a lead’s amount of website activity to the lead’s demographic profile. The best candidates for conversion are leads with a profile that makes them a strong fit for the firm and who have interacted substantially with the site, whereas poor leads did not interact with the company and the website.
