Picture it: An anonymous website visitor spends two minutes on a website. Later, an identified website visitor spends five minutes on that same website and downloads an infographic. Would you communicate with both contacts the same way? Hopefully, the identified visitor will receive a more personalized follow up because more is known about their profile and activity, or engagement, with the brand. Communication with the unknown visitor should be done with one goal in mind: to identify them. In order to make sure these two, very different leads receive the proper marketing communications, marketers need to utilize a lead scoring system to segment their prospects appropriately. But instead of sharing the top 10 reasons why organizations should utilize lead scoring, let’s take a different approach and narrow the field down to the one, main benefit of lead scoring.
Lead scoring is the mechanism for which marketing deliver leads to sales. On average, less than 25% of inbound leads are truly ready for sales, so a lead scoring system that has been refined over time is a critical component in driving lead generation ROI and revenue for the organization.
Yes, lead scoring makes lifecycle marketing easier as marketers are able to segment leads by their profile, engagement level, and lifecycle stage. However, the goal of that segmentation is to better nurture leads so they become “hot” prospects. As a result, the sales cycle shortens and organizations can incur more revenue over time.
Take for example a trade show: An organization purchases a 10×10 booth and staffs it with two salespeople and one marketing person. Over the course of a two-day show and conference, the group of three captures 350 “leads” by scanning nametags and collecting business cards at after-hours events. Of those 350 leads, how many are good, quality leads? Through a customer lifecycle marketing (CLM) solution such as Right On Interactive, marketers and salespeople alike can create a segment of show attendees and begin to market to the leads captured at the event. Throughout the follow up campaign, the CLM platform is collecting important data on each of the leads such as their title, phone number, and secondary email address as well as the number of pages of the website they have visited, total number of downloads, and even social media engagement. By attaching a score to each of these profile attributes as well as engagements with the brand, the CLM platform can provide a profile and engagement score that moves the leads from one lifecycle stage to the next, indicating when the lead is ready to talk with a business development representative. Doesn’t that make more sense than batch and blasting trade show attendees with the same message and then salespeople to following up with each of them?
The real benefit of lead scoring is it’s ability to rank leads based upon their profile, engagement level, and lifecycle stage, making the salesperson’s job easier in that they know who to reach out to based upon higher lead scores. In addition, lead scoring makes the marketer’s job easier because they know who to continue nurturing based upon lower lead scores.
If you’re considering utilizing the benefit of lead scoring for your business, consider the following questions:
- Does your sales team complain that they aren’t receiving enough leads from marketing?
- Does your sales team follow up with the leads they’ve been given?
- Does your sales team complain about the quality of leads they’ve been given by marketing?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, Right On Interactive may be able to help. To get started, check out An Examination of Lead Scoring infographic or reach out via our website to learn more.
