Lead scoring is a fantastic concept for marketers who wish to make the process of discovering which of your leads are worthwhile to your company.
Utilising lead scoring methods helps to ensure your marketing and sales processes are much more effective and can greatly save on time.
As a whole, lead management ensures that your communications with leads are being maintained and that your content is appropriate for your audience.
One of the most important ways to manage leads is to implement lead scoring. Scoring your leads can be done based on a variety of elements, depending on what your company deems most important. Common characteristics are chosen from professional information and the behaviours they have exhibited on your website and in other communications with your company.
Each of these characteristics are given a value, from 0-10, which will help you to build a profile of what constitutes as a "worthy lead". These worthy leads can then be focused on, because their profile suggests they are more likely to engage with, or buy from, you.
How to identify your lead scoring model
Most companies that actually implement lead scoring use the data they have from past leads, ones that became customers.
Look at former leads - current customers - and consider what made them strong leads in the first place? What kind of interactions or communications were made? Who was it at that company that really gave you a sales opportunity?
Then look at leads which, at the time, you believed would have became customers, but sadly did not. What attributes best define where that relationship broke down? Were they less engaged with your website, for instance?
This is much more difficult than it might think, because it causes you to identify specific characteristics. Even more so, this can be made more challenging, by your company's business model or the types of leads you store in your database?
Please note, that if your company has purchased email lists, these lists are going to decrease the amount of valuable leads you have. This is why we never advise clients to purchase contact lists.
What characteristics are best to use?
Demographic information
Do you have a preference over where your lead is based? Give negative points to leads which don't come from this area. If you prefer MDs as leads then you want to give them a higher value than those with other job titles. Consider giving extra value to those that give further information, such as phone numbers.
Company details
As a B2B organisation, give more points to those that fall into the preferred company size and sector that you're keen to capture. As a hotel looking to increase its business customers size, add more points to those who are offering company names, rather than inquiries from members of the public.
Engagement
Those that regularly open emails, over those that never have opened your emails or clicked through, should be given more value. If you have an active social media presence, reward those that choose to follow you on Facebook or like you on Twitter - as a company, not your personal profile.
Spam
A major point is to consider the kind of data you have hold of, which is why we mentioned paid-for email lists before. Those that have come from paid-for lists are automatically less likely to engage with you, because they never asked to receive your communications.
Equally, if you are a B2B business, you should strongly consider giving a negative value to leads that provide email addresses such as @yahoo.co.uk or @hotmail.co.uk.
If you have an online form or have leads in your database which include fields filled in with nonsense i.e. "0123456" for a phone number of "aaaa aaaa" as a name, then you should remove them immediately - they will never be genuine leads.
How do you know which characteristics have more value?
No two companies hold the same characteristics of the same importance. Consider which ones matter most to you and focus on them. When it comes to scoring them and giving one more or less value than another, we suggest a combination of three methods.
Talk to your sales team about what has helped develop leads into customers, then talk to trusted customers about what helped them in their thinking process. Finally, consult analytics reports about sales data and website interactions.
- Sales team: Which online content do they send to get the best interaction from customers? What is the final interaction they make before getting a meeting or event attendance confirmed?
- Customers: The odd customer interview can be best to see from the other side - the side you're really interested in - what you did for your current customers that "sold" them.
- Analytics: Put these two sets of findings into a combination with your marketing research, website data and other hard statistics. This can help solidify your beliefs from in-person research.
What next?
Talk to Thrive about lead management, generation and nurturing, as well as inbound marketing and lead scoring to improve your marketing and sales processes today.
Automation software can help do all of these methods automatically and we can suggest a number of ways to set up manual lead scoring too.
If you wish to speak to our company directors, please call 0845 838 7517 or email hello@thriveability.co.uk.
