The phrase “do more with less” has taken on a life of its own in business today, with reverberations felt throughout the entire organizational tiers.
Let us take a case study into account to understand this better:
Situation: An ABC company’s marketing group has produced huge demand generation. However, the problem lies in managing and sending those leads to sales. What it could possibly do is hand off a huge list of names or upload them to the sales database, and sit back and relax, expecting sales to call them. This could result in a salesperson’s exhaustion, thereby deriding the leads as junk.
Challenge: This kind of interaction is counterproductive, leading to inefficiencies across ABC’s revenue-bearing teams. Besides, sales productivity is also kept on edge as the ABC sales representatives work irately to stay afloat for lead qualification, while subsequently becoming less effective in their daily tasks. Several profitable leads are being lost in the meantime, mostly because they are at the bottom of the stack of junk leads.
Solution: With fewer deals available, the ABC sales representatives need every advantage to consider active and latent opportunities earlier than the competition. And to achieve this, the company needs to be working on prioritized leads, including lead scoring.
Importance of lead scoring? Lead scoring allows enterprises to move supereminent prioritization from a largely private process to a scientific and logical approach that can be managed cost- effectively and fluently. In fact, 68% of extremely successful marketers cited lead scoring as their major source of income. The tool can also enhance conversion rates by more than 50%.
Analyzing the benefits of lead scoring for B2B businesses
Lead scoring for B2B businesses or B2B lead scoring is a method to recognize which leads are most likely to generate more sales. It involves assigning scores to the leads based on their purchase behavior and characteristics, wherein a positive score indicates that the lead is a profitable prospect that is likely to convert, while a negative score would indicate that they are not a great prospect.
Advantages of B2B lead scoring
Enlisted are some of the most convincing reasons a business should try its hand at lead scoring:
- Higher conversion rates
Lead scoring offers businesses the luxury of being picky on which prospect or lead they dedicate their marketing efforts to, to achieve improved conversion rates. For instance, a company’s B2B sales team can only speak to leads scoring higher than 50. And what about those with lower scores? The firm can provide them a free trial to meet the lead management or nurturing targets. As per sources, 75% of businesses have observed a phenomenal increase in conversion rates with lead scoring.
- Improved sales productivity
Reports suggest that a smaller pool of highly qualified leads speeds up the sales process, saving huge costs and steps in the company pipeline management. If statistics are to be believed, lead scoring saves sales teams up to 20 hours per week. Meanwhile, a survey revealed that 58% of respondents claimed an increase in sales revenue with the use of lead-scoring management tools.
- Reduced time wastage
‘Lead scoring models support businesses’ limit the time to close a deal by 50%.’
Lead scoring can help save the salesperson countless frustrating hours. Tracking leads would enable companies to put their lead management plan into action right away. Sales representatives can get to work on potential leads, while the marketing team can take advantage of the marketing automation to nurture ‘yet-not-so-potential’ leads. In fact, a reliable resource stated that 36% of the marketers use marketing automation to cut down the time from their repetitive tasks.
What are the best lead-scoring practices?
When it comes to lead scoring, it is best to keep it simple, especially at first. Scoring different criteria can make it difficult to undermine the values that are actually defining the score.
The following represent some of the profitable lead-scoring practices:
- Define what happens with each lead, from nurturing to sales hand-off.
- Focus on scoring criteria with associated standardized data values to simplify program execution and refinement.
- Outline a service-level agreement (SLA) with sales that designates the follow-up time.
- Equip sales with choices for follow-up based on lead disposition.
- Constant re-evaluation of the company’s scoring system.
- Monitor the impact of lead scoring on sales. Conduct a deal analysis to unleash insights into conversions and incorporate discoveries back into the lead-scoring program over time.
In the nutshell
In the business world, lead scoring would help the sales team focus on the most promising leads and allow marketing personnel to intelligently concentrate their efforts. In a period of escalating competition, a company can start converting more leads and increasing the productivity of its sales and marketing teams by using the lead scoring strategies listed above.
