Your prospects all have a different level of maturity in the conversion tunnel, some may be at a more advanced stage than others. It is essential to understand this difference to assess the conversion potential of your prospects and improve your marketing performance. Hence the practice of lead scoring!
This technique allows you to establish an effective commercial marketing strategy according to the maturity of your prospects. It consists in calculating and awarding a score to your prospects in order to know their potential as well as their interest in your business.
This inbound marketing methodology, mainly used in B2B marketing, allows you to focus on the most committed prospects and to design the best strategy to convert others. In this way, your marketing actions will be more personalized and more targeted. Discover the good practices of lead scoring through this article.
Why do lead scoring?
Lead scoring can help you get better sales opportunities. According to statistics, almost 90 % of your potential customers are probably not ready to make a purchase. They hesitate or wait for the right time to take action. To this end, the lead scoring plays an essential role in evaluating potential buyers effectively. This technique will then allow you to focus your marketing actions on the most promising prospects.
Currently, most companies focus only on the search for new prospects . This is logical, but you will waste more time and money if the results are not there and your prospecting campaign does not lead to an act of purchase. To optimize your campaigns, you must make sure that your prospects are really interested in your activity. Like targeting, scoring is today a powerful lever for businesses . Indeed, it allows you to optimize your costs, increase your income and boost your conversion rate.
Best practices in terms of lead scoring
The scoring is largely based on the collection of relevant data about suspects and prospects. They are subsequently noted according to a set of predefined criteria . The idea is to obtain measures used to determine the probability of purchasing a potential customer. However, rating models may vary depending on the needs of your business.
There are 6 essential steps to properly organize your lead scoring strategy:
1 - Define your Buyer Persona
The first step is to define your persona or customer profile. This will allow you to determine if the profile of this person is perfectly suited to your products or services. The objective is to specify the exclusive criteria of your target audience.
Let's say that you offer useful applications or software to high -growth companies. Immediately, your ideal targets will be business leaders and especially decision -makers.
You must therefore define the criteria that meet your expectations, then you constitute your persona by performing different actions upstream:
- Study your customers' data;
- Carry out an investigation with them;
- Perform online research;
- Make an interview with your salespeople ...
2 - Determine the scoring criteria
Certain behaviors of your prospects may indicate to you whether they are ready enough to make a purchase or not. The objective is therefore to determine which prospects are the most involved in the purchase cycle. Thus, you must take into account two types of scoring criteria: demographic criteria and behavioral criteria.
Demographic scoring
The demographic scoring criteria includes essential information on your leads: age, sex, geographic position, sector of activity, company size, function in the company, etc.
These different criteria can be adapted and refined according to your needs. It is therefore judicious that these criteria are in line with your Buyer Persona.
Behavioral scoring
It is important to note that the behavior of a prospect on your website is also an important evaluation criterion. And there, for once, these factors are based on the relevance of your inbound marketing strategy . Here are concrete examples:
- The opening rate of your newsletters;
- Subscriptions on your social networks;
- Downloading your white buses;
- Comments on your blog;
- Consulting your price page;
- Registration to your webinar;
- Contact by phone, email, contact form ...
2 - Understand the customer journey
To ensure that your lead scoring strategy is effective, you must understand the course of your customers. Do not hesitate to use the data you already have in your possession. This is a very important step, because a little-committed prospect will not be inclined to set a possible meeting, as an example. There are 3 legs of leads to consider.
- “Hot” prospects that are sufficiently ready to consume your products or services. They just need a little help to buy.
- The “cold” prospects that remain to be convinced. Use the power of your content marketing strategy to offer them relevant content that provides solutions to their problems.
- “Dead” prospects that cannot be converted because they are out of target. They can visit your site, but have no intention of buying.
Understanding the journey of your prospects will allow you to distinguish how to propel them along the purchase cycle, but also to assign them points according to their level of maturity in the sales tunnel.
3 - Establish a rating scale
Now that you have the list of criteria (in an Excel file for example), it's time to give a note to each of them. To do this, you need to establish a scoring scale for your prospects. For example, if it is a 100 -point scale, you can grant 20 points to the main criteria, then you reduce the note according to the importance of the factor. Here is an illustration:
- If a prospect reads an article on your blog or registers your newsletter, you can assign him 5 points.
- If he downloads an electronic guide from your website, you can give it 10 points.
- If he participates in an event that you organize (for example, a webinar), you can allocate 15 points to him.
- If he contacts you directly and manifests his interest in your test offer, you can assign 20 points to him.
So, a prospect who decided to contact you directly or who asked for a free trial is much closer to the conversion stadium than a prospect that only read and comment on an article on your blog occasionally.
As your prospect advances in his career and he goes to a higher stage, do not miss to assign him points. Thus, prospects having obtained the best scores will be considered hot prospects . You can therefore ask your sales team to contact them as a priority. As for the others, you should wait a bit until they reach a higher score. Do not hesitate to regularly provide them with relevant content so that they gain maturity to the point of being ready for the conversion stage.
The only problem is that, this whole process, if you do it manually, can take you a lot of time and energy. The ideal is to have an all-in-one solution for Marketing Automation like Magileads.
5 - Think of negative scoring
Negative scoring is a lead scoring technique which consists in assigning negative points to a prospect. This technique allows you to refine your lead scoring strategy. Indeed, the logic wants that if the score of a lead is very high, it can be considered as a qualified lead. However, it turns out that this is not always the case.
For example, let's say that a researcher arrives on your site and download all the documents he finds. Thus, his behavioral score will be very high. But given his status as a researcher, his demographic score will be lower. You must therefore assign him negative points so that his score is more precise, according to logic.
You must remain vigilant , because someone can do competitive monitoring by claiming to be particularly interested in your activity. It will open all your newsletters, download all your ebooks and even become your subscriber on social networks ... but your offer will not interest him. In this specific case, you must simply exclude it from your lead scoring!
6 - Automate the lead scoring
It is possible to generate a large number of leads on the internet. You cannot do lead scoring manually, unless the number of leads generated is not important. On the other hand, there are platforms that allow you to manage the acquisition and scoring of leads automatically .
The Magileads solution offers all the levers to automate your prospecting campaigns and increase their king: targeting, enrichment of your databases, animation script and scoring of your prospects ... while putting more intelligence in your prospecting.
