Is Lead Scoring worth the effort??
I have worked with a number of companies; from those who
have an abundance of leads who wade through lead after lead to find the cream, to
other companies that are scrapping away to get their hands on any lead! Each company differs with their approach in
handling leads i.e. Do your sales team
generate their own leads, do you buy them in or do you have dedicated internal
sales team? Given that there are so many
options when dealing with lead gen, the golden question is how to make the most
from your leads without burning them?
Ultimately leads come in a variety of forms and just a small
increase in lead quality can result in a huge increase in sales
productivity. These changes are what
I’ve found salespeople spending hours and hours looking for by hoping their
leads will tell them something! The
beauty of using lead scoring is this information is provided to your sales team
on a plate! They can then focus their
time on converting these high quality leads into revenue.
But what is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring is the process of ascribing a value (points) to
the behaviour of your prospects. This
behaviour may be website activity, demographic profiling, email campaign
interaction or a form completion and a volunteering of their information. Different businesses will assign different
values to these actions depending on the importance of one or more of the above
actions. The joy of lead scoring is that
it is tailored to your business. This
sounds simple enough but many organisations just want to know what others have
done and replicate that…you can’t! For
lead scoring to work for your products and your sales team you need to consult
with those involved. Assigning scores to
leads moves your leads from being Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) to Sales
Qualified Leads (SQL) therefore communication between these departments is vital. History will show there has been friction
between these departments with marketing throwing quantities of unqualified
leads at sales and sales wasting potential leads looking for the ‘quality’! Lead scoring can solve this! But first you need to find out what the ideal
lead looks like from both a sales and marketing perspective and define these
boundaries. The scoring profiles will
evolve and next generation marketing requires flexibility, adaptability and
quick changes – adopt this philosophy and you’ll see your business grow.
Lead scoring doesn’t have to be complicated and next time
some tips coming your way…
References –
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