A base model of the sales funnel primarily consists of five consequent stages of a customer’s journey that begins when the customer first becomes aware of the product’s existence/need, and finally ends with the customer making a purchase.
Now, depending on the company itself, there are various strategies used by the marketing and sales team to guide the customer towards that final stage of the sales funnel, but unfortunately, unless the leads are any good to begin with, the chances of a conversion are very slim. To understand how a business can improve the quality of the leads and the sales process with lead scoring, read on as we discuss a few key points.
Integrate Marketing Automation with the CRM
According to Wikipedia, marketing automation (MA) can be used for a variety of purposes, including the development of targeted marketing campaigns, customer data management, campaign performance analysis, and of course, lead scoring, alongside other functionalities that can help the sales team better direct their efforts. To help with correlating these analytics, the use of resources like https://www.epsilon.com/us/products-and-services/data can be helpful for customer and consumer data.
You probably already know that marketing automation is an essential part of the lead scoring process, but in order for MA to work at its maximum efficiency, it needs to be integrated or synced with the customer relationship management system (CRM) as well. What real-time sharing in between the two does is that it gives your MA constant access to the customer data which is being stored and updated in the CRM system. Zendesk integrations could be one such tool that may help in keeping the customer data accurate and up-to-date.
Naturally, this highly relevant information base improves the performance of your lead scoring system, since it now recognizes the potential/target customer better and therefore, boosts sales performance by generating better leads as an automatic result of the integration.
Depending on your software provider, the MA and the CRM system can come as a package from them, making the integration seamless, but in case that is not an option, make sure that the two are easily compatible with each other. In case they are incompatible, you need to find a better solution in one or the other.
Define the Lead Scoring Model with the Help of the Sales Team
Before you examine how to define a lead scoring model, always consult the sales department first. They are the ones who are communicating with the present leads directly and indirectly, so their input is extremely important to improve the sales performance, because they know the leads more personally than anyone else. Use their insight in defining the lead scoring model in the following areas:
- Behavioural actions such as email response, social media interaction, etc.
- Which kind of jobs do the best leads hold?
- What in their opinion should score the most and the least points in the model?
- Are some of the high scoring criterions in the present model, irrelevant or inadequate in their opinion?
Micromanage the Scoring Model
The performance of the marketing automation will depend mostly on the criterions that you set for the scoring model, so micromanagement is necessary here. To explain the point, let us take the example of web traffic and how to micromanage and differentiate between the different kind of visits, so that you can set up a scoring system that’s more minute and on point.
Did a person just visit the main page of the website, or did the individual also visit the product pages? Someone who visited the product pages as well should score higher on the model than the individual who left the site after just a home page/landing page visit. How much time did the lead spend on each page? Did the lead visit multiple product pages? These and much more should be relevant in determining the final score of each lead, instead of assigning the same point to every lead that visits the website.
This is just one example, of course, and the micromanagement needs to be a lot more encompassing. It will take time and the collaboration of your sales department, but once you are done, the lead scoring model will definitely improve the company’s sales figures as the model is now based on minute and yet, extremely relevant details, enabling the lead scoring system to generate high-quality leads with high conversion rates. Do keep in mind that even an established scoring system will need to be updated every once in a while to adapt to changing market trends.
At the end of the day, lead scoring is just another technique to improve your sales performance and unless it can achieve that, it is not a valid system and changes need to be made in the right places, which mostly involves the scoring system but isn’t just limited to it either. Hopefully, what we discussed here today was able to provide you with some insight on what those changes should be to improve sales and revenue with a lead scoring system that is being optimized and utilized properly.
