Lead Scoring - Guide for Modern Marketers

What Is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is an objective ranking of one sales lead against another. This not only helps align the right follow-up to the corresponding inquiry, it also helps marketing and sales professionals identify where each prospect is in the buying process. The process of defining lead scores improves alignment and collaboration between marketing and sales teams. After all, by jointly establishing an objective definition of a quality lead, sales and marketing can exchange better feedback on the quality of leads being passed to sales. Plus, lead scoring helps ensure that the best leads are followed up on immediately by prioritizing leads according to revenue potential and buyer readiness.

 

WHY LEAD SCORING MATTERS TODAY

Doing more with less has become a corporate mantra—and the ripple effect of it can be felt at all organizational levels. Consider the demand generated by your marketing group: How do you send all those leads to sales? Many marketing organizations simply hand off huge lists of names—or upload them to the sales database—and then sit back and expect sales to call them. After a few calls, most salespeople give up, deriding the leads as junk. And so the finger pointing begins.

This kind of interaction is counterproductive, causing enormous inefficiencies across an organization’s revenue bearing teams. Sales productivity, in particular, can suffer as your
sales reps work furiously to stay afloat, while at the same time becoming less efficient in their daily tasks—undermining the goal of doing more with less.

In the meantime, dozens of hot leads—legitimate opportunities—are being thrown away simply because they’re on the bottom of the pile of junk leads.

With fewer deals available, your sales reps need every advantage to get in front of active opportunities first, and develop latent opportunities earlier than the competition. To do that, they need to be working with prioritized leads. Lead scoring prioritizes leads based on prospect, profile fit and level of interest.

Lead scoring enables organizations to move lead prioritization from a largely subjective process to an analytical, scientific approach that can be managed easily and cost-effectively.

And, the benefits don’t end there. The concept of scoring can be applied throughout the integrated sales and marketing funnel. Forward-thinking companies are applying scoring
algorithms to account scoring, opportunity scoring and other stages in the buyer’s journey. As a result, they’re able to focus their efforts where they’re bound to get the best return.

 Martech

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