The importance of generating leads cannot be stressed upon enough. Chances are, their importance doesn’t need to be highlighted either, because anyone in the field of marketing or sales knows it all too well. However, ranking those leads after scoring them according to their respective merits is the most important step in converting leads into sales. Not everyone who is seemingly interested in your products/services is willing to buy right away, or may not even be looking to buy at all. Successfully determining and differentiating between leads that require immediate attention and the ones that only need to be kept in the loop is synonymous to successful marketing and sales. In light of that fact, the following should serve to explain the importance of adopting a proper lead scoring system and the advantages it brings to any lead-based marketing effort
It Minimizes Effort and Prevents Misdirection
Resources in business are always limited and therefore, it is imperative to guide them towards the most prospective leads first, instead of wasting your valuable marketing resources on the nonproductive ones. A lot of SaaS and B2B companies have built a lead scoring
system within their marketing automation software, that cleverly shortens the sales cycle. As each lead is scored continuously, the user has the unique advantage of only directing their marketing and sales efforts towards potential customers when the relevant leads manage to reach a high enough score on the system. This effectively cuts out misdirecting of marketing efforts and boosts sales results consequently, because now you are not only attending to the most valuable leads, but also doing so exactly when they are most likely to make a purchase.
Lead Scoring Lets You Identify Future Prospects
As a business, you cannot just think short term, but must also make preparations for the future, and that’s another benefit which a well-designed lead scoring system brings to marketing. Just like the urgent leads are identified to better direct your immediate sales and marketing team’s efforts, what the system does is that it identifies future prospects as well. If we were to look at the situation from a sales funnel perspective, most of your target customers, aka leads, are at different stages of the sales funnel. A lead scoring system helps you to identify where they are exactly and then slowly lead them towards making that purchase, even if that sale date is still a bit far away. In fact, customers that are just looking around and comparing their options are perfect marketing targets for a well-designed marketing strategy with multiple layers.
Lead Scoring Lets Businesses Build Better Relationships with their Leads
If you adopt and utilize a good lead scoring system, you will be able to generate a wide variety of lead types, including sales, information, warm and cool, and marketing qualified leads. Each lead is then ranked in the system based on its potential conversion. Now, you can analyze the information, which will ultimately enable you to generate more sales and build better relationships with your customers. Once again, from a marketing point of view, the better you are aware of your customers’ needs, online behavioral patterns, likes, and dislikes, the more customized marketing efforts the marketing team can put forward to not just convert leads into sales, but also to maintain good relationships with the client for future purchases. In fact, the information that the marketing team has about the customer will also enable a smoother transition when the marketing department hands over the lead to the sales team. The sales team will know how exactly to cater to the needs of the customer who is about to make a purchase.
The Importance of Negative Scoring
Negative scoring helps a company eliminate useless leads from their list, so that the marketing and sales efforts can be better focused towards the more promising potentials. For example, if certain leads are viewing the career section of your website frequently, negative scoring will eventually remove them from the leads list, or push them down enough so that your efforts are not wasted on people looking to get a job rather than make a purchase. Of course, it could also let you identify potential employees, but they do not have a place on the leads list for obvious reasons. Similarly, any “lead” that is not really a potential customer can be identified and eliminated with the help of negative scoring incorporated within a good lead scoring system to improve the quality of the overall leads list.
Thanks to social media and the internet in general, generating leads and marketing with customized content is a lot easier and more widescale in 2019 than was ever thought possible before, but even then, that effort needs to be as pinpointed as possible. Lead scoring is an important tool for companies to achieve exactly that and much more in terms of properly directing and managing their sales and marketing resources.
