Why is Lead Scoring Important?

The following is an excerpt from IMPACT's ebook, "The B2B Marketers Checklist for Accurate Lead Scoring." For more expert tips on delivering more qualified leads to your sales team, be sure to check out the full ebook.

Perhaps the most notable trademark ofan inbound marketing campaign is its ability to drive more traffic, and generate more leads from your website.

While this is certainly great news, the downfall is that many marketers and businesses alike are squandering these opportunities by attempting to sell to leads that simply aren’t ready to be sold to yet.

Lead nurturing? Simply overlooked in an effort to skip right to a sale.

In fact, according to Marketing Sherpas, only 21% of B2B marketers have actually established a lead scoring program.

This is precisely why lead scoring has become an essential aspect of any marketing campaign; it allows us to score leads based on their actions, giving priority to only the most qualified of leads.

Why is this important?

Well…it ensures that your sales team isn’t wasting their efforts on leads who aren’t yet ready to buy, and even worse, are unqualified.

How Lead Scoring Works

Using the HubSpot software, you can assign scores to leads who either: Meet certain demographic information, orPerform certain activities on your website.

While you can use any scale you’d like, we recommend keeping your points for any single activity between 0-100.

Using the custom lead scoring tool in HubSpot, you can assign a set of rules to be applied any time a lead completes an action that you deem important to the sales process.

For instance, perhaps anytime a lead visits your pricing page, the software will automatically assign them 40 points, as any lead who has taken an interest in your pricing structure is surely more qualified than those who have not, right?

By establishing a set of rules that automatically score your leads will have a significantly positive affect on your entire sales process.

Before You Get Started

This goes without saying, but before you can get started with any lead scoring strategy, it’s imperative that both your marketing and sales teams sit down and establish the criteria for what makes a qualified lead for your company.

Talk with your team and determine which demographics, activities, and behaviors make a lead more qualified, or what us marketing nerds like to call an MQL (marketing qualified lead.)

Which demographics are more likely to buy than others?

• CEO’s or other C-Level executives?

• Do they represent smaller or larger businesses?

• What kind of revenue are they bringing in?

This is the information you should be gathering from you lead capture forms.

Setting Point Values

Once you’ve clearly identified what makes a qualified lead for your company, you can more effectively develop a points system to assign values to the certain criteria that makes a lead qualified.

Determine What Score Makes a Lead Sales-Ready

Once you’ve successfully assigned point values for the criteria and marketing activities you’ve identified as important in qualifying a lead, decide at which point total should a lead be considered sales-ready.

And remember, the whole goal here is:

• To avoid scaring leads away before they are ready to speak with sales.

• Make your sales process more efficient by enabling your sales team to work with only the most qualified of leads.

Continue reading the full ebook...