leadscoring“Lead scoring’ is described spot on by Jay Famico from SiriusDecisions as a “methodology used to rank prospects against a scale that shows the perceived value each lead represents to the organization”, based on behaviors (engagement) and demographics (fit).

According to Jay Famico, the key benefits of an effective lead scoring model are:

  • Increased sales efficiency and effectiveness: Lead scoring focuses sales attention on leads that the organization deems most valuable, ensuring that leads that are unqualified or have low perceived value are not sent to sales for engagement. Through this prioritization process, sales receives higher-quality leads, which increases conversion rates – the percentage of leads that teleprospecting and sales accept from marketing, the percentage that become sales qualified, and the percentage that turn into won business.
  • Increased marketing effectiveness: A lead scoring model quantifies for marketers what types of leads or lead characteristics matter most. This helps marketing to more effectively target its inbound and outbound programs and deliver more high-quality leads to sales.
  • Tighter marketing and sales alignment: Lead scoring helps strengthen the relationship between marketing and sales by establishing a common definition for which lead types are ready for teleprospecting or field sales attention. It provides a common language with which marketing and sales leaders can discuss the quality and quantity of leads generated. Alignment and trust correlate directly with the accuracy of the scoring model; if too many false positives pass the scoring filter, the scoring model loses credibility and, ultimately, its positive impact on marketing and sales alignment.

Indeed, lead scoring allows a business to customize a prospect's experience based on his or her buying stage and greatly improves the quality and "readiness" of leads that are delivered to sales organizations for follow-up.

Lead scoring is most commonly done by using a Marketing Automation (MA) platform such as those provided, for instance, by Marketo, Eloqua, Hubspot, or Pardot. These platforms use cookies to track and keep a history of website visitor's activities and then use that data to assign a score to that visitor. Upon conversion, filling out e.g. a form, such marketing automation platforms tie this data to the information given through the form and create a lead. According to Marketo, for instance, a 10% increase in lead quality can bring a 40% increase in sales productivity, which is a quite impressive result.

Well, last but not least, I want to point out that the most accurate lead scoring models include both explicit and implicit information: explicit scores are based on information provided by or about the prospect (e.g. company size, industry segment, job title or geographic location); implicit scores are derived from monitoring prospect behavior, such as website visits, whitepaper downloads or e-mail opens and clicks. A new type of score is the ‘social score’, which predicts lead relevancy based on analyzing a person's presence and activities on social networks.

By MediaBUZZ