When Is The Right Time To Implement Lead Scoring?
There may be various reasons why you may not be ready to deploy Lead Scoring systems yet.
Lead scoring can be an extremely useful system, if implemented correctly. Lead scoring is essentially exactly what it sounds like-- automatically labeling your leads with a defined score as they come through your marketing funnel. Although this can benefit both your marketing and sales department, there are various reasons why you may not be ready to deploy this system yet.
What Is Lead Scoring?
If your sales team is overwhelmed with leads, they may have a tough time reaching out to every lead efficiently and effectively. Setting up a lead scoring program allows you to identify who is sales-qualified right off the bat and who requires further lead nurturing from your marketing department. Considering less than 25% of new leads are ready to buy, identifying where recently generated leads fall is essential to your marketing program.
Your company as a whole can benefit immensely from a lead scoring system. Recognizing hot leads quickly improves productivity which in turn streamlines your sales process. As the sales team determines where leads fall on the buyer’s journey, marketers can measure the effectiveness of their nurturing and improve their campaigns.
Is Lead Scoring Right For Me?
“My sales team receives some leads but has enough time to contact each one as they come in, in order to determine if they are a good fit with our company.”
No (Put Lead Scoring On The Back Burner)
A sales team that isn’t receiving quite enough leads does not need a lead scoring system. Having enough time to contact each qualified lead as they come in is not a bad problem to have. This allows for your sales team to communicate with each lead without losing anyone in the midst of an inbox chaos. If your sales team is not contacting the leads that are sent to them, lead scoring simply isn’t going to work. Following up with leads is imperative to closing customers, so leads must be contacted before ranking them is even considered.
Perhaps the easiest problem to solve is not having enough data in order to implement a ranking system. Information must be gathered in order to segment leads and set criteria based on visitor behavior and interactions. A visitor who downloads offers and visits the product page is going to be ranked much higher than someone who is browsing your site. This kind of behavioral data is needed before lead scoring is right for your business.
“My sales team is swamped with the amount of leads coming in. They cannot call each lead in an efficient manner. We have collected a lot of data about our visitors but it is hard to keep track of them.”
Yes (Work With Sales & Marketing To Outline Your Program)
In order to benefit from lead scoring, your sales team should be packed with both MQL’s and SQL’s-- they do not have enough time to contact everyone and are losing qualified leads for your business. As humans, we can only do so much. For these hectic instances, lead scoring is key. Companies that implement lead scoring at the right time have a 192% higher average lead qualification rate (HubSpot).
Setting the right criteria is the most essential (and hardest) aspect of setting up a scoring system. Attributes that are commonly scored include demographic information you gather such as their job title and company, alongside their interactions with your site, email promos and your content offers. Once criteria is set and the sales team is on board with a follow up process, lead scoring can be implemented fairly easy.
Although the initial implementation may be clear, the execution of your new lead scoring program is not static. This program must be constantly updated and improved in order to create a solid process and always fulfill a closed-loop marketing system.
Original Article
Find out more on the future of Technology at our DLUK - Trends Briefing on the 24th September 2015