While driving sales is not a piece of cake, it does not have to be frustrating either! But, that’s not the case with most B2B marketing and sales teams.

Hence, a simple yet effective way of optimizing your marketing team’s efforts, managing your sales pipeline, and transforming your ROI is by implementing lead scoring. 70% of professionals agree that assessing the quality of your leads is crucial for amping up your conversion rate. With lead scoring, you can do this with minimal effort and maximum benefits.

Let’s understand everything about lead scoring in detail.

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is a sales practice that allows marketers and sales teams to determine the value of their leads. 

Calculating a lead score allows you to objectively judge the value of any particular lead in quantitative terms. You can measure a lead’s value based on several factors ranging from demographics to behavior. 

Each of these factors is assigned a certain number of points contributing to a lead’s overall score.

Calculating a lead score is a highly efficient technique for B2B businesses to identify and weed out unqualified leads from their marketing funnel. It also allows you to track when a lead is warm/hot and hence ready to convert.

Why You Should Score Your Leads

Let’s understand why lead scoring is important:

1. It Makes Your Marketing Campaigns More Effective

The number one benefit of lead scoring is that it brings more effectiveness to your marketing campaigns. 

Lead scoring makes optimization of marketing campaigns a lot easier. Since you are keeping track of all your qualified leads, you will better understand whom you’re targeting and what marketing tactics and practices fetch more such warm and hot leads. This way, your business can focus on the marketing efforts that yield the best results.

2. You Can Align Your Marketing & Sales Efforts

Alignment between the marketing and sales department is essential for a business to succeed in converting sales. Without lead scoring, there is a very high chance of a mismatch between the marketing and sales teams resulting in lots of slips through the cracks.

Lead scoring allows your marketing team to determine the value of a lead in a quantifiable manner. This makes it easier for you to identify the leads that qualify for your business.

Identifying qualified leads ensures that the marketing team only passes on the best leads to the sales. This way, the sales department can focus its efforts on leads with a high chance of converting.

3. You experience faster conversions

Hubspot’s 2021 sales statistics findings reveal that at least 50% of your leads are most probably not the right fit for you to sell. You would not want to waste your time trying to convert these unqualified leads.

When you score your leads, you can identify the right leads that have a chance of moving down your sales funnel and converting into a customer. This allows you to make the best use of the leads in your pipeline without dealing with any bottlenecks caused by cold leads. 

The warm and hot leads identified through lead scoring are converted faster and at a high rate because of their pre-existing readiness to purchase, making it one of the essential benefits of lead scoring.

4. Your revenue and ROI Goes Up

The best and most crucial benefit of lead scoring is an increase in your marketing and sales ROI.

• 68% of successful marketers consider the practice of lead scoring to be the top contributor to their company’s revenue
• With lead scoring, you amplify the ROI in terms of sales from your marketing team’s efforts— an action that 43% of marketers find at least somewhat challenging.
• Businesses using this technique have a 71% higher ROI from their marketing efforts than their non-lead scoring counterparts.

Lead scoring allows you to prioritize converting leads with a high value on your lead score scale. This results in a much higher conversion rate and eventually increased ROI for your marketing and sales effort.

The Structure of A Lead Scoring Model

An effective lead scoring model allows you to provide all your leads with a personalized nurturing experience. This is crucial in sales, where 66% of consumers admit that they would not purchase if business content does not address their interests. 

Here are the six factors that give you a great idea about your ideal lead for conversion and then move on to the subsequent stages of attempting to convert them.

1. Demographics

The most fundamental criteria for analyzing how valuable a lead is for your business is to focus on the demographic factors. 

Analyze factors such as age, experience, job position, and location. All these demographics provide you with a basic profile of who is showing interest in your company.

This allows you to focus only on the people who match your ideal customer profile (ICPs) right from the start.

2. Firmographics

Similar to demographics, firmographics are also crucial for determining your ideal lead and focusing only on them.

Firmographics include company name, company’s size, industry to which it belongs, the revenue it generates, etc.

All this information is crucial for B2B businesses since it is not individuals who are genuinely your target audience. It is the companies to which these individuals belong.

3. Online Behaviour

The online behavior and activities your leads exhibit is another factor that needs to be considered when determining where a lead stands on your scoring scale.

The behavioral factor consists of something as simple as visiting your company’s website. It can also include activities such as signing up to your email list for obtaining a lead magnet.

All these activities indicate how engaged a lead is with your product/service and allows you to judge their level of interest.

4. Email Engagement

Email engagement is a vital indicator based on which you can score your leads. Signing up to your email list means that your lead has slowly moved to the middle of your sales funnel. However, this does not automatically mean that they are a warm lead now.

If your lead is routinely opening their emails from you, clicking on links included in the email, and having a good reading time, then you can reasonably assume that they are interested.

5. Social Engagement

Social engagement is possibly the most significant indicator in today’s age, where everyone uses social media platforms. 

If your leads are interested in your products/services, they will follow your company’s social media accounts.

Keeping track of how much a lead engages with your company’s social media is one of the best ways of gauging their interest in making a purchase.

6. Spam Detection

This is one of the most critical factors that does not get talked about enough. Not all leads who sign up for your email list or download your lead magnet are interested in your product.

While the information your company shares through its content marketing efforts is directed towards the target audience to drive a sale, the fact remains that many would want to use this information without being interested in your company.

Keeping track of who fills in what information with intentions is a big part of understanding if a lead is worth your time. If someone fills in incorrect information or enters fake information, reduce their lead scores accordingly.

Important Types of Behavior

Lead behavior shows how much interest leads have in your products or services. 

While there is no end to how they react to or interact with your company’s marketing efforts, specific interactions can be considered very positive signs.

While you need to learn on your own about how to judge certain behaviors indicated by your leads, here are four significant types of behavior you need to understand to get you started:

1. Pageviews

The number of times a lead views your website, certain blogs, landing pages can be a huge indicator of how serious they are about buying your product/service.

What pages they view, how many times, how often, and more can be great metrics to measure their behavior.

Bump up the scores of those leads who spend a lot of time browsing your website and reduce the scores of those who have not visited your website for long.

2. Search

What your lead researches about your product or service are another vital factor that can convey their intentions and how much they have made up their mind.

If your lead is diving into researching pricing breakdowns, then they are pretty close! You need to swoop in immediately and make them realize the value they will get from their money to be tempted to make a purchase.

On the other hand, if your lead is just looking at the testimonials on your website, then it means that they are not quite there yet. You should score such leads lower.

3. Downloads

What your lead downloads from your website matters immensely in understanding what they are interested in and how much they have made up their mind.

Did your lead download a simple lead magnet consisting of a checklist? They are probably just considering their options and testing the waters about how much value you can provide.

Are your leads downloading detailed reports, white papers, and case studies from your business? It looks like they are already very much interested in your product/service and want to conduct in-depth research now.

Score your leads depending on how weighty and detailed their downloads are to have an objective assessment.

4. Webinars

Webinars are an excellent indicator of your lead’s interest in your product or service. If your lead has signed up for a webinar conducted by your company, it means they are trying to understand the value you would provide.

But, signing up for a webinar again means that they are red hot, and you need to start planning your strike immediately! It shows commitment to understanding the product in-depth and should be scored very high.

How to Build A Lead Scoring Model?

Whether you are trying to build your first lead scoring model or want to optimize the existing one, here are three lead scoring methods you can choose from:

1. Manual

Building a lead scoring model manually is the most tedious since it does not involve using any software to aid your efforts.

In this method, you need to evaluate your experiences and those of the marketing team to understand what common characteristics all your hot leads exhibit. This will give you a good starting point about all the criteria qualifying leads exhibit.

Once you have your different factors and criteria ready, you need to assign points to them depending on how useful they are. 

After you have put your point system in place, you are good to go with scoring your leads. The higher a lead’s score, the hotter they are.

2. Probability

The probability method of calculating leads depends slightly more on technology than the manual method. However, it is still a fundamental technique that requires your effort.

This is because the probability method bases itself on the manual way. You need to put in the manual effort of assessing existing leads, coming up with factors for scoring points, and assign points to each factor before you can use this method.

Then you can use software such as Microsoft Excel to input all your data into a spreadsheet. Once the numbers are organized, you can use a formula to calculate the probability of a lead converting into a customer.

The only difference between this method and the manual method is that a simple data entry software crunches all the numbers for you.

3. Predictive

The predictive method of building lead scoring models involves relying greatly on lead scoring models such as Hubspot. These take off the burden of assessing your existing leads and assigning points almost entirely from you.

A lead scoring software will use artificial intelligence and information from third-party data websites to analyze your existing leads. This would allow it to set the right criteria with appropriate points without your intervention.

The lead scores for all leads will be calculated automatically. As there are changes in your matrix of leads, the criteria and scoring system will be updated automatically.

Avoid These 3 Mistakes While Scoring Your Leads

Lead scoring is not a complex task and can be carried out by any sales professional once the basics have been mastered. However, that does not mean that it has no scope for making mistakes at all.

If you are a rookie to lead scoring, you need to know about these three major mistakes right now so that you can avoid them at all costs:

1. Not Scoring on Both Fit & Interest

While fit stands for how much your lead fits into your ideal customer profile, interest indicates how much interest your lead is showing in your product/service.

How much your lead fits into your ideal customer profile depends on their demographics and firmographics. Secondly, how much interest your lead shows in your offer depends on their behavior and engagement.

Lead scoring is all about balance. You cannot entirely rely on either one of these criteria to score your leads. It is vital to balance these two factors to focus on leads whom you want to convert and who want to be converted.

2. Scoring on Whim

If you guesstimate all the scores for what makes a lead qualified, you might end up with many cold leads in your pipeline who scored high simply because of engaging in certain activities that were scored high.

Moreover, you also need to instill a negative scoring system to keep your leads’ scores as objective as possible. This would ensure that warm leads that disappeared suddenly do not waste time by being nurtured.

3. Excessively Simplifying Your Lead Scoring System

Lead scoring is all about depth and analysis. You cannot expect an excessively simple lead scoring system to yield you results.

If you want to score your leads objectively to have an authentic way of measuring them on a scale, you need to make sure you have many rules and criteria in place. An in-depth understanding of your ideal lead, what kind of behavior they exhibit, and how they will interact with your company’s content are significant factors influencing a lead’s quality.

Make sure that your lead scoring system dives deep into the background and psychology of your ideal leads so that you can manage your pipeline effectively.

Calculate lead scores the right way for better ROI

Everything so far should give you a perfect understanding of how, to begin with, lead scoring. However, lead scoring also requires tons of experimentation, like all sales techniques.

You need to deconstruct and reconstruct your lead scoring model a considerable number of times based on the results it is yielding to optimize it. It might feel tiring at first, but nothing can stop you from scaling your conversion rate once perfected.

Investing your time and energy into lead scoring is well worth it when you realize that it ultimately spares you the frustration of a poor ROI and a mismanaged sales pipeline.