Building your business-to-business lead score could potentially be a lifesaver for your business. Many companies don't realize that they are wasting their time trying to market to people who just aren't going to convert. In fact, MarketingSherpa has stated that around 73% of all B2B leads are not even sales-ready right now. Which implies you're most likely spending unnecessary time on your marketing strategies right now. So let's jump into lead scoring and how it's affecting your B2B.
What is a Lead Score Exactly?
A lead score is a tracking system implemented by a company that helps with ranking and qualifying each lead to a numerical value. The rank of each lead will depend on whether they are sales-ready, need to be nurtured with an outreach source such as email or if they need to be discarded altogether.
When developing a lead score, your analytics will be broken up into two sources of information: explicit and implicit information.
Explicit Scoring
This is information that is usually submitted by the lead on a voluntary basis. Information used with the explicit scoring include looking at the demographics and firmographics of all aspects of the business. In addition, explicit scoring takes a careful analysis of a company's budget, authority, needs, and timeline (BANT) to help with understanding all of the ins and outs of the business. This is a critical factor in really deciding if a company is going to be sales-ready or not.
Implicit Scoring
Implicit scoring takes information from the internet and helps with scraping all information related to the "digital world". This often includes looking at how many viewers a website is getting, social media shares on posts, email engagement, and even the number of clicks being done on the website as a whole.
Since technology can be a huge source of success for a business, knowing how a business is doing on the internet will help decide how well they will respond to you and your product.
Benefits of Lead Scoring
Using both explicit and implicit information to help score the information, a business can use a lot of the information and automate their processes to focus only on those who are sales-ready and in need of your product. Around 66% to 81% of businesses still don't practice lead scoring.
1. High Productivity and Sales
Instead of forcing your employees to follow-up on every lead and forcing them to cold-call a list of unqualified leads, lead scoring can help with a higher productivity. Your employees can invest their time into calling people who are qualified and more likely to convert to sales. Filtering out all of the bad leads and all of the unqualified leads will assist with developing a lead scoring system that will help with shortening the overall sales cycle.
2. Higher Conversions
While a lead scoring system may not necessarily develop more leads, the point of it is to help with targeting the leads you have and pulling out only the most qualified. This means your business can focus its attention on getting more quality leads.
Quality leads will be people who stay with your company for years to come and you continue to generate profit from them. It's better to have a few qualified leads versus a few flimsy leads that only convert for a small amount of time. Knowing who is going to really benefit from your product will lead to a long-term sales solution.
Invest in a Scoring System that Is Built for Productivity
The time you invest into research for a scoring system will help with getting a quality product. Not all lead scoring products work the same and they have a different scoring process they use. It's important that you have a lead scoring program that is built and managed correctly to maximize your results. When provided with a great system, 68% of marketers say that lead scoring is effective and improved their overall program's revenue. Failure to have a product that meets these specs can negatively impact your business.
Look for a system that has a negative scoring impact as well as a positive impact. This can help with filtering out the bad leads as well.
Create profiles for your customers to help with tracking their overall productivity and possible value to your company. Keeping a constant log of this can make manual tracking also more apparent. Having someone look over each company manually could be a valuable addition to your lead scoring process.