A common problem many companies face is a misalignment between sales and marketing. Often, this is a result of the two departments targeting different goals.
Marketing is focused on bringing in more Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) or Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) – often defined without agreement or input from the sales team – while the sales team cares about how much they actually close. In reality, goals should be shared across the teams.
Recent insights suggest that synergy between sales and marketing could lead to a 32% increase in revenue and a 20% increase in win rates (Hubspot). However, despite these potential gains, the majority of B2B marketers are still routing all leads directly to sales without adequate qualification, leading to inefficiency and lost opportunities.
Enter lead scoring.
It’s just one facet of aligning sales and marketing, but it’s an important one. Lead scoring ensures that a) the leads that are going to your sales team are actually qualified and b) your salespeople are actually following up with the leads they receive from your marketing team.
Get started with lead scoring: download our free lead scoring template here.
Why Lead Scoring?
In B2B marketing, lead scoring stands out as a crucial strategy for aligning the goals of sales and marketing teams. It’s more than just organizing leads; it’s about bringing structure and clarity to the process of evaluating and prioritizing potential customers. This strategic alignment is key to ensuring that sales efforts are focused where they are most likely to bear fruit.
The Evolution of Lead Scoring in Modern Marketing
- Technology and Compliance: Lead scoring has evolved dramatically, with AI leading the charge in offering predictive insights for more personalized lead categorization. Moreover, compliance with data and privacy regulations and legislations have become a cornerstone, ensuring that lead scoring practices build trust and adhere to legal standards.
- Leveraging Market Insights and Social Media: Predictive analytics is vital for staying ahead in the B2B market, offering insights into emerging trends. Additionally, the role of social media has grown, with its interactions now playing a significant part in gauging lead engagement and readiness.
Enhancing Customer Engagement through Lead Scoring
- Personalization: In today’s market, lead scoring is not just about efficiency; it’s a powerful tool for personalizing the customer journey. Understanding a lead’s score enables marketers and sales teams to tailor communications effectively, matching the lead’s specific interests and needs.
- Targeted Engagement: The integration of analytics and social media insights into lead scoring empowers B2B marketers to engage more effectively with their clients, leading to improved conversion rates.
- Prioritization and Rapid Responses: Advanced lead scoring is instrumental in enabling B2B sales teams to focus on the leads that matter most, ensuring timely and relevant responses, especially crucial in lengthy B2B sales cycles.
- Win Rates and Deal Closures: The effectiveness of sophisticated lead scoring models is evident in the B2B sector, where they are closely linked to higher sales win rates and successful deal closures, highlighting their importance in a competitive market.
With these advancements in lead scoring, it’s vital to establish a systematic and effective lead scoring process. This process should not only adapt to the contemporary data-driven marketing landscape but also align with the nuanced requirements of sales and marketing.
How to Build an Effective Lead Scoring Process
1. DEFINE
Lead scoring should begin with getting your sales and marketing teams to create a shared definition of what a qualified lead is. Agreement is important here because it will help formalize what a qualified lead is so that if there are issues with performance moving forward, you can see where to course correct. If the sales people are getting qualified leads but aren’t closing, it’s an issue on that side; if marketing is sending leads that aren’t qualified according to the formalized definition, then they need to make improvements on their side.
Some of the questions you want to ask in order to define what a qualified lead is include:
- Is the lead a decision-maker/an influencer in the decision-making process?
- Does the lead work at a company with enough annual revenue to purchase our service or solution?
- Is the company they work at part of our target vertical or industry?
- Is the lead from an account we are targeting?
At a basic level, you want to identify the fundamentals that will qualify or disqualify the lead.
2. QUANTIFY
Lead scoring involves assigning a score to each lead so that you can quantify how qualified that lead is. We recommend building categories, assigning points to those categories, and determining a score that indicates a lead is qualified. Here is one approach that we’ve used successfully for clients in the past:
Categories
Lead Profile: The profile is meant to tick the right boxes and determine whether or not the lead fits your ideal customer profile. It may include (but won’t be limited to) characteristics like Job Title, Annual Company Revenue, Number of Employees, Industry, Location, and more.
Lead Intent: Intent helps you identify whether or not a lead shows signs of being a serious buyer and can help signal to you how ready they are to talk to your sales team. This category may include characteristics like what pages they viewed on your site, forms they’ve filled out, how many times they’ve visited certain pages, and more. If you are collecting information through forms on your site, you can create fields that can help indicate intent. For example, a drop-down field that includes options like “just browsing” and “searching for x solution”.
Lead Engagement: Engagement is a simple way to categorize the amount of activity and interaction a lead has with your marketing/sales collateral and can help indicate how ready to buy they are or their level of education/familiarity about your product or service. Characteristics can include email opens/clicks, number of visits to your website, number of forms filled, last activity date, and so on.
Assigning Points
Once you have determined your categories and defined which characteristics you want to track, you can begin assigning scores. This part can be a little tricky, but going through this exercise will help you weigh which lead characteristics are the most important in determining how qualified a lead is.
For example, if you believe that company revenue is a very important characteristic, assign a weight that is higher than, say, location. This process takes a little bit of thought, but it will help you break down what lead attributes are really important to your organization.
Set Your Score
Building off the assignment of points, you now want to look at what threshold makes sense for calling a lead qualified. The key here is to determine a standardized number of points — if a lead reaches X number of points, they are ready to talk to your sales team. We recommend testing this score against some of your ideal clients to see if it aligns. It’s not going to be perfect at first, but doing this exercise against existing clients can help you figure out if you’re on the right track.
3. AUTOMATE
Lead scoring can be done manually, but it will take quite a bit of effort and you won’t be able to dig as deep as you can with automation. For organizations that are using marketing automation or some form of lead management/CRM, you may already have the tools in place to automate lead scoring.
Hubspot, for example, has a built-in lead scoring function (depending on your subscription tier) that allows you to assign scores to certain attributes and characteristics. The system will then calculate what score a lead has and update that score based on any changes to those attributes. As lead information changes, so does the score. You have the ability to automatically pass the lead to your sales team once they reach the “qualified” score you’ve determined.
4. ITERATE
Your lead scoring won’t be perfect the first time around. It should be revisited and iterated upon based on data, learnings, and feedback from your sales team. You may find out that certain characteristics you thought were important in determining sales-readiness aren’t actually that important. You may have failed to include certain attributes in your lead scoring process altogether.
The more you measure and the more feedback you get, the more effectively you will be able to score and qualify leads moving forward.
Advanced Lead Scoring Techniques
Beyond the traditional approaches, the current environment calls for a few additional, advanced techniques:
Predictive Lead Scoring
Using AI and machine learning, businesses are now able to analyze large datasets to identify leads most likely to convert. This involves examining past sales data, social media trends, and global market trends to make real-time adjustments in lead scoring. Such an approach is key to focusing on leads with the highest conversion potential, continually refining scoring criteria based on evolving AI insights.
Account-Based Scoring and Marketing
Integrating Account-Based Marketing (ABM) with Account-Based Scoring effectively targets high-value organizational accounts. This method involves assessing entire organizations by their market presence and engagement, prioritizing those with the greatest potential. The insights from lead scoring are then used to tailor ABM strategies, enhancing engagement and increasing the chances of larger deals.
To learn more about Account-Based Marketing, check out our guide here.
Integration with Sales Enablement Platforms
Effective lead scoring is further enhanced by integrating it with sales tools. This ensures that lead scores are updated in real-time within CRM systems, facilitating a seamless transition of prioritized leads to sales. Such integration aligns marketing and sales efforts, ensuring a cohesive approach to lead management.
Final Thoughts
Having a lead scoring system can really set you apart from the competition. When it’s finely tuned to match the specific needs of your market and potential customers, it’s like turning raw data into a treasure map. It points your sales team right where they need to go – to those leads most likely to convert.
Customer paths are anything but straightforward and sales cycles can stretch out, and having a lead scoring system that’s both precise and flexible isn’t just nice to have – it’s essential. By embracing these strategies, you not only align sales and marketing but also sharpen your company’s ability to close deals with precision, speed, and efficiency.
Download our free lead scoring template to get started!
Curious about how you can implement lead scoring for your company? Contact us to learn more.