How effective lead scoring can increase sales team productivity?

Lead scoring offers advantages. Many sales reps waste their time trying to market to people who just aren’t going to convert.

The solution to this problem? A lead scoring system that identifies the best leads for the sales team, meaning that the sales team can focus their time and resources on the leads that will convert.

Lead scoring is useful to identify potential clients

One common problem that leads scoring can resolve is having too many leads.
The idea is simple: the marketing team generates leads and transfers them to the sales team. Nevertheless, not all the leads are good to be sent to the sales team: some leads need to be disqualified, some need to be nurtured and some need to be sent to sales on the spot.

For sales reps, receiving bad leads comes with a cost. Firstly, it takes up time that they could spend building a relationship with good leads. Secondly, engaging with a lead that needs to be nurtured and that is not sales-ready will result in the loss of a potential customer.

In order to disqualify leads, you need to have a qualification and scoring system in place. Traditional lead scoring is just as good as marketing and sales team alignment is. It is essential that the sales and marketing teams have the same vision as to what qualifies as sales-ready. You can score prospects based on their demographics, firmographics, content engagement, behavior, and interest.

Depending on the size of the company and the financial resources at your disposal, you can opt for a marketing automation system such as Marketo that nurtures, scores and transfers qualified leads to sales reps, or an “à la carte” solution such as SalesWings website tracking and lead scoring add-on which focuses on predictive lead scoring and which lets you know which leads are sales-ready. Once you identified the “hot leads” a dedicated platform as Datananas allows to engage with these leads via highly personalized emails campaign, which manages follow-ups as well. Thus your sales team only focus on positive responses and stop losing time following ups.

With a lead scoring system in place, the sales team no longer has to shoot in the dark but instead can call the right person.

Lead scoring enables a higher conversion

As pointed out above, sales reps thus have access to qualified leads. This means that sales will not only close more deals “faster”, but they will also have long-standing clients that will stay with the company for longer. There is no better way to increase sales than by selling to existing customers.

Speed of response

As pointed out in the article ‘Speed of response’ by SalesWings, “the timeliness of a vendor’s response to inquiries is indeed the number one reason why buyers choose the winning vendor”. This means that sales teams need real-time information about buyers’ behavior in order to proactively contact them. Most lead scoring tools will automatically inform the sales team when a lead turns hot.

Better customer experience

A good lead scoring system will deliver a better customer experience. For instance, it is possible to see what content or channel is driving qualified leads. It is also possible to create an appropriate user experience. Indeed, you take into account their interests, behaviors, and readiness to make a purchase. Moreover, knowing which leads are not sales-ready makes it easier to develop an appropriate follow-up strategy.

Traditional lead scoring vs predictive lead scoring

As mentioned previously, the main goal of lead scoring is to separate a qualified lead from an unqualified one.

In traditional lead scoring, the marketing team, with the help of the sales team, needs to define a series of qualifying factors that will define if a lead is qualified for that business. For example, one criterion could be that people in the software industry are a better fit than other sectors. So, you will add and deduct points to the leads based on the information you are able to collect and the selected criteria. For instance, you could add +10 points to a lead in the software industry. Depending on the score of the lead you will then either transfer it to the sales team or nurture it.

In predictive lead scoring, it is the algorithm that predicts who in your database is qualified or not qualified. Different tools will take into account different information when predicting the score.

In conclusion, an effective lead scoring program or tool can bring control to the lead management process. This will ensure that sales team benefits from higher quality lead. It will offer a higher conversion rate and increased revenue for the company.