5 Ways to Know That Your Company Needs Lead Scoring

So you've heard of lead scoring, but you aren't sure if it's right for your company.

We've compiled five questions you should ask yourself to determine if your company will benefit from implementing lead scoring into your lead management and lead nurturing strategies. Did you know that less than 10% of companies actually practice and utilize lead scoring?

See if lead scoring is right for your company before you lose all of your qualified leads to competitors in that 10 %.

Interested about learning more about implementing your lead scoring strategy? Be sure to check out our new ebook, "The B2B Marketers Checklist for Accurate Lead Scoring." 

1. Your Company is Generating A Lot of Leads

Once you begin to attract a high volume of leads, you are faced with the challenge of separating the good from the bad. When you are generating a higher volume of leads it becomes hard for your sales team to determine which leads should be called upon or nurtured.

This is where lead scoring comes in, allowing you to attach a numerical point value to each of your leads based on their behavior on your site and the information they provide in your lead capture forms. If you a have a low volume of leads to the point where they are nonexistent, lead scoring will not be beneficial for you. Instead, you should start to focus on implementing other strategies that will help you generate more leads. 

2. You're Capturing Demographic Information on Conversion Forms

Has your company defined marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads?  If so , you should be asking for more targeted information on your conversion forms. You want to be capturing demographic information such as job title, industry, number of employees, location, age or even sex. Let's say you are an inbound marketing company looking for prospective clients, you would want to see how well they fit into the criteria for a marketing qualified lead.

To put it simply, if  certain demographics are helpful to your sales process, assigning point values based on the ones you value most will ensure the cream rises to the top.

Consider asking:

• How many employees does your company have?

• Do you only work with companies in the state or the United States. Where is your company located?

• What is your role at the company?

By collecting this type of information on your lead capture forms, you will be able to give those leads a score based on the information they provide. This allows your sales team to separate the good leads from the bad. Those leads with a higher score such as 125, will be a better fit for your company, compared to a lead with a score of 20.

3. Sales Team is Frustrated with Unqualified Leads

Is your sales team coming up short? Is your sales team frustrated with all the unqualified leads they're engaging with? These are all signs that lead scoring can be beneficial for you and your sales team.

How great would it be for the sales team to automatically see which leads they should engage and interact with. No one wants to spend hours of calling and sending emails to leads that are unqualified. With lead scoring you can put a muzzle on all that complaining about how the sales team is always calling bad leads.

4. Marketing is Frustrated with Sales Because No Leads are Closing

Is your marketing team frustrated with sales? Is marketing working their butts off generating a ton of leads every day but none of those leads are being closed? If this is the case, it is very likely that your sales team is unable to determine which leads are qualified.

Implementing lead scoring will keep sales from harassing leads that are not ready to buy as well as identify leads that need to be nurtured before being contacted. It is not best practice to contact a lead right after submitting a form especially if they aren't ready or even looking to buy from you.  Wouldn't you want to maximize the efficiency of your sales team?

5. Lost Opportunities to Competition Due to Timeliness

Are you generating such a high volume of leads that your sales team is drowning? Unable to see where the good leads are?

If so, your sales team can be losing good leads and opportunities to their competition. When your sales team is unable to separate the good leads from the bad, they are more likely to call or engage with any lead they see. By having a lead pipeline that is too big, you are most likely missing all of your opportunities. By the time sales reaches those prospective leads it is to late. Who wants to lose opportunities to their competition? Probably not one sales person!