Tag: lead scoring

5 Lead Tracking Best Practices To Manage Your Sales Pipeline

Even if your business does not have written documentation of the details of how you move your leads through pipeline or funnel, you must be still following a series of steps for lead tracking the prospective customers that guide you from point A to point B in your sales process. Now in order to identify the weakest point of your present sales process, it is as simple as identifying the best and the worst things about your lead’s movement in the sales pipeline. This is because, even if you get tons of apparently profitable leads from a free lead generation tool, or by sharing free resources, but eventually lose half of them, it could be a sign that you need a better lead tracking solution and the best lead tracking practices that will help grow your business.

Even if your business does not have written documentation of the details of how you move your leads through pipeline or funnel, you must be still following a series of steps for lead tracking the prospective customers that guide you from point A to point B in your sales process.

Now in order to identify the weakest point of your present sales process, it is as simple as identifying the best and the worst things about your lead’s movement in the sales pipeline.

Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. - DemandGen Report Click To Tweet

This is because, even if you get tons of apparently profitable leads from a free lead generation tool, or by sharing free resources, but eventually lose half of them, it could be a sign that you need a better lead tracking solution and the best lead tracking practices that will help grow your business.

Hence irrespective of whether your businesses goals are to provide better service to your customers, or build better social media engagements, or just find more time on your hand, understanding your organization is the primary step to tracking sales leads which can be as easy as using a CRM software or setting up spreadsheets for finding sales growth.

BEST PRACTICES FOR IMPROVING SALES LEADS TRACKING SKILLS

1. Create an Email Sending Sequence

A big part of managing leads involves nurturing the leads. Therefore even before you send your first email to your prospective customers ensure that you have an entire sales cadence ready that you can send out sequentially over the course of weeks or months.

This is because as one of the leading vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools, we have observed that just one email and thereafter one follow-up are never enough to understand the effectiveness of your lead nurturing campaigns.

Hence businesses must use an email tracking tool like a CRM platform that can allow organizations to track and measure email opening rates, click-through rates, replies, and bounce rates of the emails, which are all important metrics in determining the efforts of your email marketing campaigns.

Therefore it is only with a structured email sequence, you can find a controlled variable to judge upon individual lead responses, which is an info that you can track to find the interested prospects and also those leads that require a bit more convincing.

2. Schedule Follow-Ups

We all know that not all the leads that enter the sales funnel will be at once ready to buy your offerings. Therefore it always requires some extra work to be done before finding successful conversions.

Hence it is important that businesses must invest in lead tracking, lead generation, and lead automation software solutions since by actually neglecting to nurture and talk to your leads, you will be eventually wasting a good deal of money that your business has spent on acquiring them in the first place.

Now you might think that tracking 20 potential customers through your sales pipeline is an easy job, but that changes when that number of leads up to the 100s.

This is because losing track of where your leads are in your sales pipeline (which ones are reading what content or which ones have received your proposals) can be detrimental to your sales process.

Therefore you should schedule your follow-ups to understand exactly where your prospects are in the sales pipeline, and what the next step should be so that you do not start overselling even before enough resources have been shared with the prospective customer, or you might forget them altogether and make them fall through the crack.

3. Follow a Lead Cycle That Makes Sense

While it is always beneficial to nurture and build relationships with long-term leads, instead of exclusively going for the relatively short-term ones. Lead cycles can go on for months and might even take more resources than it is worth.

Hence stick to a lead cycle that essentially makes sense with the model of your business, so that you can increase your profits.

This is important since which B2C leads tend to have a shorter cycle, like if you are an e-commerce site, a fortnight of nurturing campaign is sufficient, whereas for B2B leads the nurturing process can last as long as several months and with some lasting up to a whole year.

Therefore imposing a lead cycle for your business, will help to ensure that your sales reps do not keep engaging with the same prospects over and over again. Moreover shortening your lead cycle will also help to keep your sales pipeline fresh with new leads flowing into the funnel and ensure that your sales reps are pursuing new leads every day and thereby connecting with new opportunities on a regular basis.

4. Track the Sales Pipeline

Now while the sales funnel focuses on the stage-by-stage conversion of the leads, the sales pipeline reflects only what is on your plate at this very minute.

Therefore if you are just keeping track of your sales funnel using a sales CRM tool, consider integrating the sales pipeline also into your process.

This is because when you successfully track the leads through the sales pipeline, it becomes much more easier to remain cognizant of what each lead requires from your company.

Hence think of your sales pipeline stages as steps and formulate what actions are needed to be taken at each stage, since when you can organize leads this way and track them according to their placement in the sales pipeline, you can create a standardized process on how your sales reps should approach the leads.

This also makes your lead nurturing process simpler, whereby you can perform mass actions and create relationships with your leads as a group that can reduce your efforts, but you must do it without forgetting about personalization.

5. Practice Lead Scoring

Finally, you must practice lead scoring, which is a process of segregating leads that belong to the highest priority down to leads that of the least priority in the funnel.

Businesses can score their leads using a business CRM tool based on their urgency, project size, availability of resources, and more.

Therefore instead of treating all leads as the same and one, this practice helps to focus more resources, personalization, and efforts on leads that are more beneficial for your business.

Lead scoring also makes it easier for businesses to understand when it is the right time to weed out unresponsive leads from your sales pipeline when you are sifting through hundreds of leads and thousands of data points that need to be monitored every day.

In other words, lead scoring helps your teams to make decisions at a glance without even worrying about making uninformed decisions in their lead tracking endeavors for finding sales growth.

Conclusion

Now as you must have understood by now, that ultimately all these lead tracking practices can only be performed by a single business growth tool which is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, which is a platform that is dedicated to lead management and lead nurturing and can easily perform any of these tasks simultaneously without fail.

Additionally, an all in one CRM can also help businesses to understand the best performing sales reps in their teams as well as the movement of their leads along the pipeline, generate reports and make you see trends in your sales processes that can amplify your efforts to stay on top of new and ongoing leads for finding rapid revenue growth.

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How CRM Software For Financial Services Industry Can Improve Customer Experience Effectively

For most of us, the financial service industry is a deeply personal zone. This is especially all because, customers entrust their financial advisors, banks, private lenders, and investment firms to safeguard or grow their hard-earned money. Irrespective of whether the money is slated for a child’s education, or on a home, or for a dream retirement, the stakes remain high. Hence, a customer’s choice of a financial institution or advisor may always have a lasting impact on their ability to attain their financial goals. Additionally, many of us still struggle with basic and fundamental financial knowledge, which is exactly the reason why millions of people across the globe may make critical decisions about who should manage their funds without fully understanding their options to choose wisely in the financial marketplace.

For most of us, the financial service industry is a deeply personal zone. This is especially all because, customers entrust their financial advisors, banks, private lenders, and investment firms to safeguard or grow their hard-earned money.
Irrespective of whether the money is slated for a child’s education, or on a home, or for a dream retirement, the stakes remain high.
Hence, a customer’s choice of a financial institution or advisor may always have a lasting impact on their ability to attain their financial goals.
Additionally, many of us still struggle with basic and fundamental financial knowledge, which is exactly the reason why millions of people across the globe may make critical decisions about who should manage their funds without fully understanding their options to choose wisely in the financial marketplace.
Hence for people working in sales in financial services, this situation presents a dilemma, whereby they fail to understand how they can persuade their prospective customers to buy their services when in reality their customers have very little knowledge of their offerings.
Now, part of the answer to this question may be solved by using a CRM software for financial services industry, which can help the sales reps to log in customer data and interactions consistently into the software, which can help them to better identify their prospect’s and customer’s needs and thereafter provide relevant information that is not only persuasive but all better-suited for their customers.

You don’t close a sale, you open a relationship if you want to build a long-term, successful enterprise – Patricia Fripp Click To Tweet

The Value Of Customer-Facing Knowledge

As stated above being one of the leading vendors of Merchant Cash Advance CRM we know how the financial service industry differs from others.
Consumers in the retail industry can try on clothing and access them for style, they can even determine by themselves whether they can enjoy the services of an expandable cable package, but they cannot understand the benefits of buying a financial service.

Hence much like an attorney or a physician professionals working in financial services are considered trusted experts in their fields, upon whom a customer may rely on their perceived expertise and trustworthiness to evaluate the value of a financial representative.

Thus in this landscape customer-facing knowledge has as a result become vital, not just for communicating but even for understanding when it is the right time to communicate with their customers.

Now the risk of manual management of customer and prospect data can easily overwhelm the sales staff in the financial industry and so to streamline this process a financial services CRM is what is needed to manage inputs and thereafter also retrieve information from the customer-facing data, without the requirement of tedious up keeping.

Hence the adoption of CRM software for financial services industry aids the staff in the financial sector to tailor their customer-representative interactions that can build trust for closing a deal in a meaningful way.

How A CRM Organizes Customer-Related Data

In modern times CRM software solutions are a cutting-edge outgrowth of early customer contact lists found in paper-files, and Rolodex machines of the pre-digital era.

In fact, the CRMs that are available for modern-day businesses have made a vast stride over its predecessors.

So what kind of information can an easy to use CRM house inside its database?

The answer to this is- Customer information.

Now customer information is more than a phone number with a name since it can also include a plethora of contact point data (like an office, residence, and cellular phone), as well as demographic data such as age or gender and transactional data like last purchase made or service-related data and more.

Detailed financial services CRM tools can even include notes from customer interactions with any employee within the company and also perform lead scoring that can help to rank customers and prospects for the sales teams to prioritize their efforts.

For managers working in a financial organization this data stored in the CRM database, can provide crucial insights into performance- such as their progress towards individual sales targets, or identify factors that are most important for retention of their existing customers.

Connecting CRM Data And Sales

According to research done by a major CRM vendor of global repute, it shows that CRM can boost sales by up to 29 percent.

Now an increase in sales is not the only improvement that CRM software can offer to its users. As one of the most popular vendors of MCA CRM tools, we know there are also several studies done on this business growth technology that shows using a CRM sales forecasting accuracy of the sales teams can grow by some 42 percent.

This is because while using CRM sales reps can spend more time on accomplishing high-value tasks and less time entering or searching customer information, which ultimately translates to happier sales staff in an organization that can help improve the bottom line.

Take Away

Hence the four most important ways that a financial institution can find more value from a CRM software for financial services industry is by harvesting more opportunities through immediate connection to the past conversation and requests that are done by a prospect or a customer, identifying key interactions that help build trust with the customers, find the right type of prospects that is in line with the services offered by the organization, and finally, by providing improved customer service through enhanced customer knowledge, since modern easy to use CRM is a tool that is capable of disseminating up-to-date knowledge in real-time to everyone involved that can boost marketing and sales efforts and more importantly help retain the customers years after their first agreement with any finance-related businesses.

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How Lead Scoring Benefits Businesses Using Merchant Cash Advance Software

If you are using MCA business and is using Merchant Cash Advance software for your alternative funding business, what should you do next after attracting a high volume of leads? Remember, not all leads are the same, and therefore, separating the good leads from those that are not can be really challenging. This is exactly where if you are using an easy to use Merchant Cash Advance CRM solution like ConvergeHub, solid lead scoring comes into play. According to a report published by APSIS, only 44 percent of companies are presently using lead scoring systems to grow their business.

If you are using MCA business and is using Merchant Cash Advance software for your alternative funding business, what should you do next after attracting a high volume of leads? Remember, not all leads are the same, and therefore, separating the good leads from those that are not can be really challenging.

This is exactly where if you are using an easy to use Merchant Cash Advance CRM solution like ConvergeHub, solid lead scoring comes into play.

According to a report published by APSIS, only 44 percent of companies are presently using lead scoring systems to grow their business.

Just 56% of B2B organizations verify valid business leads before they are passed to Sales- MarketingSherpa Click To Tweet

Therefore, before it gets too late you as a user of MCA CRM software should maximize this methodology and leverage your alternative lending business from your competitors by unveiling meaningful insights to improve your sales processes and your funnel.

In fact, lead scoring is a time-honored process, which most often exceeds expected benefits such as sales productivity and effectiveness, increased conversion ratio, and measurable ROI.

However, even before we delve into how we can build an awesome lead scoring model for your MCA business, let us talk primarily about whether you should have it and if so why.

Candidly, lead scoring is truly a tedious process, therefore, it is most essential to determine if lead scoring is suitable for your MCA business, to ensure that you do not waste time, money, and effort dedicated towards it.

Why Implement Lead Scoring in MCA business?

The most intriguing factor about lead scoring techniques is it does not come as a “one-size-fits-all” methodology. In fact, not every business needs an advance lead scoring model for their business. Nevertheless, lead scoring provides your business with a scientific and automated means to rank your leads, in a quantifiable manner, to calculate their perceived value in your organization.

Let us look at an example:

Suppose Jack, an owner of a large departmental store, visits your website. Since you do not know about him yet, he starts from the score of 0. However, as he interacts with your website more his scores increases subsequently. Per say, information about his title (+10 Points), he requests a cash advance demo (+10 points), he is from a large retail outlet (+5 Points). Now, once your lead reaches a certain point (based completely on your individually created criteria), where Jack is deemed sales-ready, it is time to send your sales team to reach out and convince Jack to convert him into your customer, by closing the deal.

The lead scoring technique is most often used with Merchant Cash Advance CRM software for improving the sales process, align marketing and sales, prioritize leads and lastly for creating higher quality conversions.

Now, to determine if lead scoring is required for your cash advance business, here are some questions you should consider as a user of MCA CRM platform, which aids in implementing the lead scoring methodology.

–Do you have a very high volume of leads flowing in from several channels, than your sales team can follow up within a specific time?

– Do you have enough information in your MCA CRM database for lead scoring?

–Do you have a particular content from a lead nurturing strategy, which needs to be delivered to a lead at a specific time in their buying journey?

–Do you feel that your sales processes can be more effective and efficient than what it is now?

If your answer is affirmative for all or most of these above-mentioned questions, then we would readily recommend that your alternative funding business organization is ready to start with a lead scoring system.

Otherwise, we would suggest you to primarily focus on generating more leads, establish an SLA (Service Level Agreement) between your marketing and sales teams, and collect and track the right information from your forms and website.

If you do not have enough leads to start lead scoring for your business, do you know ConvergeHub offers FREE LEAD GENERATOR Tool, which is a free lead generation software that you can easily download from ConvergeHub website?

Implementing a lead scoring methodology is extremely difficult to do manually (using spreadsheets) as a lead’s activity can change every day. Therefore, you need Merchant Cash Advance software or online lead management software, like ConvergeHub, which has an excellent lead management system to implement the modeling we will discuss below.

Basic Framework of Lead Scoring Setup

According to SiriusDecisions, 90 percent of B2B (Business-to-Business) companies are applying lead scoring. However, on the other hand, only 40 percent of sales reps have said to have found value from it. Although various factors can contribute to the failure of this remaining 28 percent, we are sure if you start on the right foot when implementing this system, the lead scoring methodology is always beneficial, especially as your business grows in years and becomes more complex over time.

Demographic Lead Scoring

Primarily, you need to outline what your MCA business needs by identifying your ideal lead. To begin, you need to select the demography based on your lead’s characteristics. Like, who are more likely to purchase your offerings compared to others? Is it small or large enterprises? In what industry/business and in what level?

Using lead capture forms helps you to collect this data. You can easily capture four basic demographics:

  • Job title or role
  • Number of employees or size of the business
  • Industry or business type
  • Department

Assign points based on your ideal lead. For example, for company type, you may assign higher points for B2B and lesser for B2C leads. This also works for the lead’s industry (like retail, small shop, large departmental store, among others) and seniority (like the owner, the floor in charge, sales rep and others).

Behavioral Lead Scoring

The second type of data that you need is how your lead interacts with your website. This process of lead scoring is based on the actions that the lead performs to indicate their interest. While in this behaviors such as opening an email, attending a webinar, or request a demo gets a higher score, similarly unsubscribing from your email list or webinar or canceling a demo request gets negative points and consequentially that lead goes further down the sales pipeline.

Here are some examples of the type of interests you can observe from your leads:

  • Web pages they viewed
  • Emails they opened
  • Content they downloaded
  • Webinars they signed up for

Apart from this, it is also important to consider your leads activity levels before you consider and mark your leads with the help of lead scoring as sales-ready.

Here are some examples:

  • Number of web pages viewed
  • Number of forms completed
  • The typical sales cycle for your company

How to Build a Killer Lead Scoring Model

Now once you have completed your basic framework, you can combine the information found in both these data, to paint a complete picture of your lead.

Note: It is always best to keep a separate and a combine sore of the two data. Because although the demographic data normally remains stable, the behavioral data can always change over a certain period of time. 

As we mentioned earlier that lead scoring is a tedious process, therefore getting your demographic and behavioral data is just the start of the lead scoring process, after which you need to proceed with the following:

  1. Identify your criteria

Now, that using your lead scoring framework you have created a foundation of your Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL), whereby your MQL are more likely to convert into a customer, compared to other leads based on their demographic and behavioral data. To set up a lead scoring process, you will have to assign points or scores as a basis for your lead scoring methodology.

For this, it crucial that your MCA organization to extract insights, use lead intelligence and analytics of your Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, to find the unique attributes including customer base, sales cycles and key differentiators that focuses on your efforts on finding high-quality leads, which results in more conversions.

  1. Assign values

It has often been said by many that figuring what the score should be may be one of the hardest parts of the lead scoring process.

In most of the cases, the threshold for the lead scoring scale ranges in-between 0 to 100 (but you can also set any value as you like).

In ConvergeHub Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, you can easily segregate the leads into three main categories: Hot, Warm, and Cold.

Leads that have a score of over 80 can be considered ‘Hot’, while leads that get a score between 30-80 can be denoted as ‘Warm’, while ‘Cold’ leads should have a score below 30. Although, you can always customize the range based on your company’s individual preferences and needs.

  1. Determine sales-ready score

The main point of implementing a lead scoring process is to identify the leads that are ready to accept your alternative funding services. Therefore, by identifying leads, which are sales ready (with a score in-between 80-100) your sales reps can prioritize whom to follow up with to maximize their time.

According to MarketingSherpa:

When 73% of leads are not yet sales-ready, this is where this process becomes more crucial, as you have to make sure your sales team will only reach out to the lead once the opportunity is right. Since the lead score can change every day, a tool such as an easy to use CRM solution featuring lead scoring updates the score instantaneously based on your criteria.

  1. Test your model

These three steps mentioned above are the most crucial factor to cover while implementing a lead scoring methodology in any business. However as lead scoring models are never sacrosanct or set in stone, it is only by testing in real-world scenarios; you can get a hands-on and more reliable results. So monitor your MCA lead scoring model for a few months and then if needed revise the scoring criteria and the lead scores against each of these criteria by analyzing past leads before finalizing your lead scoring process.

  1. Aim for continuous growth and improvement

A lead scoring model that is based on data collected with the help of Merchant Cash Advance CRM software for the growth of your alternative lending business is a real game-killer.

Always be open for improving, testing, and tweaking your lead scoring model, since although developing a lead scoring system takes time, but its effects can always be improved.

Therefore, involve your sales department and check in monthly or every fortnight to make sure everything is working fine, since behavioral lead scoring needs to be reset over time, to identify scores that need to be redefined according to the behavioral data of the leads, which can change over a certain period of time.

Ways To Warm Up Leads Using Your Best Small Business CRM Software Platform

Every lead is singular, therefore understanding what messaging they will reply to, and what actions they are taking on your website makes lead nurturing easier. Although it might seem like a massive undertaking, it is a lot simpler when you are using your best small business CRM tool. Now if your organization has an impeccable sales enablement strategy, it is likely that you will most probably be already using a CRM tool, which can be used to warm up leads and therefore improve your company’s sales performance.

Every lead is singular, therefore understanding what messaging they will reply to, and what actions they are taking on your website makes lead nurturing easier. Although it might seem like a massive undertaking, it is a lot simpler when you are using your best small business CRM tool.

Now if your organization has an impeccable sales enablement strategy, it is likely that you will most probably be already using a CRM tool, which can be used to warm up leads and therefore improve your company’s sales performance.

38% of businesses surveyed experienced higher lead to opportunity conversion rates thanks to lead scoring.- Kentico Click To Tweet

HOW YOU CAN USE YOUR CRM TO WARM UP LEADS?

  1. Use automated communicate to keep them warm consistently

While it is true that you do not want to spam any of your potential leads, you should also keep communicating with them times and again so that they do not lose interest in your offering and look somewhere else. Using small business CRM software allows you to automate your email marketing campaigns and set up sales sequences to grab every lead that comes into the system.

It is natural, following up on every lead, which needs warming up and nurturing would be practically impossible if your system is fetching more than 1000 leads a month. Nevertheless, using a CRM means you can enroll fresh leads into automated work, which takes the pain out of the lead nurturing process.

You must also use your small business CRM to make certain that your attempts at re-engaging are not becoming annoying to your prospective leads. For example, if you are blasting a dozen emails in a day without any response, you will easily be able to see that information in your CRM software and then can adopt a different strategy to warm those non-responsive leads.

  1. Know what stage your leads are in the buyers funnel and send them appropriate contents

If you are using a small business CRM such as ConvergeHub, it is a trouble-free process to define leads by where they are in your sales funnel, assign them as marketing qualified or sales qualified, and identify the buyer persona.

Now, once you have demarcated your leads into different stages of your sales and marketing funnel, and you are aware that your lead is qualified, it is much easier to send them the required content useful to them at the stage they are in the pipeline.

  1. Look at their past actions and behaviors

Modern small business CRM software platforms are capable of tracking clicks on landing pages, website visits, email opening rates, and content downloads, which provides a great insight into what actions your leads have taken previously and what contents can pique their interest. Therefore, once you are using a CRM, and you have this information on your fingertips, you can send relevant contents to your leads that they are more likely to respond.

  1. Keep a lead in contact with the same person

People feel more confident with people rather than with companies. Therefore, prospective leads are more likely to respond to information coming from an individual they have previously interacted, than to a generic email, such as ‘info@company.com’.

Nobody wants to speak or respond to “info”, rather they want to speak to ‘Mike’ or ‘Gracie’, with whom they have interacted previously or have seen or read on the company’s website.

Now you may think what does this have to do with best small business CRM.

Well, when you are using a CRM platform, you can easily assign leads to sales reps of your choice, those who are thereafter termed owners of the leads, and so any communication going out from a lead-owner to the prospect is considered as a reliable information that is recognizable by the receiver of the communiqué.

Since it is not advisable to warm up any leads if they are not opening their emails, using a CRM platform ensures that all leads are properly distributed, and all communications come from persons that your leads trust and recognize personally.

  1. Re-engage old customers

Like a microwave meal, old customers those who are needed to be warmed up again are also as valuable as your new leads. Hence, if you are using your small business CRM efficiently, you can always have a list of previous customers you can retarget. All best small business CRM such as ConvergeHub are capable of taking note of any actions taken and communications done with old customers, and so your sales and marketing departments should be able to gauge the prospects past responses, and thereafter re-engage them with the appropriate messages.

Takeaway

Follow these five steps and take the hassle out of lead nurturing by using your CRM for small business to its full potential.

At ConvergeHub, we have a team of professionals skilled in lead nurturing and marketing automation to help you synergize your marketing and sales efforts.

Try ConvergeHub For Free

So why wait, go for a 14-Day free trial of ConvergeHub and let us help develop a lead nurturing strategy to supercharge your revenue.

 

5 Key Factors Of Successful Lead Scoring

The inbound marketing bug has already bitten most of the modern day marketers. Therefore, once your inbound marketing is running successfully and you are generating a high volume of fresh leads, you need to score those leads for further actions. Successful lead scoring aligns marketing and sales automatically. When it comes to lead scoring, we have some good and some bad news for the readers of this blog. Disclosing the bad news first it is, that only 23% of salespeople say that the marketing department delivers sales-ready leads. However, the good news is that this does not have to be the case. Lead scoring that provides sales-ready leads is easier than you can think, as long as you comprehend your buyers and build a lead scoring process around their behaviors and interests.

The inbound marketing bug has already bitten most of the modern day marketers. Therefore, once your inbound marketing is running successfully and you are generating a high volume of fresh leads, you need to score those leads for further actions. Successful lead scoring aligns marketing and sales automatically.

Only 23% of salespeople say that the marketing department delivers sales-ready leads- Data2CRM Click To Tweet

When it comes to lead scoring, we have some good and some bad news for the readers of this blog. Disclosing the bad news first it is, that only 23% of salespeople say that the marketing department delivers sales-ready leads. However, the good news is that this does not have to be the case.

Lead scoring that provides sales-ready leads is easier than you can think, as long as you comprehend your buyers and build a lead scoring process around their behaviors and interests.

Comprehending your leads

A well-performing lead scoring machine can align marketing and sales efforts and do wonders for your pipeline. The most efficient lead scoring sees two main aspects of a lead’s journey with your brand: Behavioral aspects and Demographic aspects

Behavioral aspects

The behavioral aspect of your prospective customer’s interaction with your product or service includes the way they purchase, where they like to interact (web, phone, social media, email) and what they find most interesting about your brand. Web analytics are a powerful way to understand the lead’s interests in tracking how many web pages a lead visits on your brand’s website, which pages they like to view more and for how long. Are they opening the emails in one of your particular campaigns or responding particularly well to an SMS message about a new product or service?
All these are behavioral aspects of a lead.

Demographic aspects

The demographic aspects of any lead identify common characteristics of your prospective customers. Especially main characteristics such as company size, location, the range of the revenue. On an individual level, the demographic aspects include categories such as job titles, age group, gender, income level and others.
However, the most vital demographic aspect of the lead scoring process depends on the particular business on an organizational and individual level.

The critical harmonious balance for the lead scoring technique is where the behavior and demography intersect. Once you identify that intersection, it is time to build the lead scoring system for your brand.

5 Key Factors Of Successful Lead Scoring

Which are the factors that you apply for setting up your lead scoring process completely depends on your business model, but these building blocks of the lead scoring system are the same for all small and medium businesses.

Here are the five key factors for setting up an effective and robust lead scoring process that can automatically align both your marketing and sales efforts. 


  1. Define your criteria

Even before you start your lead scoring rules, brainstorm with your sales team for identifying your brand’s ideal customer. This is the basic criteria for building your lead scoring system. There may be different types of customer personas for your ideal customer, if it is so, find out where do those buyers overlap.


  1. Recognize your Target Audience (TA)

Once your ideal customer conditions are finalized, the next step is to identify your TA (Target Audience). The questions that you should ask your marketing team to find out your TA may include:

  • Are you TA based in Europe, North America, Middle East, or are they spread across the globe?
  • Which income group is the TA inclined towards?
  • Is your TA composed of mid-level management or top-level managerial staffs?

Although your sales team may help you to find information about your target audience, your marketing team is best equipped to answer these queries on your TA.


  1. Define your brand’s unique customer journey

Find out what the steps in your customer journey are, and how these steps should be scored? Once you have the characteristics of your leads well defined, focus on your lead’s behavior with your brand. List out all the possible touch points through which your prospective customers engage with your brand before they become your loyal customers. Over here, some behaviors may be more important than others. Make a list and assign score points to empathize each step’s importance. These mentioned steps may include:

  • A lead opening an email
  • A lead visits and signs up on your website’s signup page
  • A lead registers for a webinar etc.

The points allocated for each of these actions taken by the leads may vary from business to business.


  1. Structure a system and assign scores

After the behavior and characteristic aspects have been identified, define your lead scoring structure. For example, if you focus on the North American market, then you give leads from North America a positive score versus a lead from China or India (or this might also be the other way around). Another instance is when you allot a negative score to any lead coming to your brand’s job page because those leads are concerned for working in your organization and are not anxious about buying your product.

Once your lead generation process is ready for operation, you need to deal out a particular number or score to every touch points of your leads, which should be based on the priority that you have set for each aspect.

Do you want to provide higher scores to leads visiting your brand’s pricing page than leads visiting your career page?

Do you want to give a higher score to leads coming from private companies than those are from government institutions?

All these decisions should be incorporated into your lead scoring system.


  1. Track and Tweak

The last key factor to this lead scoring building blocks to make a good lead scoring system is to continuously track and tweak the lead scoring process.

Do not be surprised if you discover new aspects of your lead’s behavior that are crucial to defining a buy-ready lead.

For example, if you find that leads that are visiting your blog page are converting more than who are visiting your webinars, you should revise your lead scoring points for webinar visits and increase the ranking for the blog visits of your prospective leads.

Conclusion

Most silo marketing automation systems and easy to use CRM that have inbuilt marketing automation platforms, provide some sort of lead scoring functionality. However, it is essential to choose the one that exactly syncs with the model of your business.

Moreover, lead scoring for small and medium business is different from what it is for large enterprises. Therefore, always discuss with your sales and marketing team to improve your implemented lead scoring process.