Lead Scoring: How to Take Your Sales From Good to Great
Ensure that your business focuses on its priority leads by means of lead scoring, a marketing approach that will help your company close as many sales as possible.
Lead scoring is a marketing concept in which each of the potential clients a company is hoping to work with is given a score. The score represents how likely that client is to make a purchase. This score is given to the sales department so that they can give their primary attention to the leads with the highest scores. This strategy is a relatively new one in the realm of demand marketing, but it is effective.
For a B2B company online, it is important to gather as much explicit information as possible to contribute towards the lead scoring of potential clients. This includes factors like the size of the company, the industry, the prospect’s title and where the company is located. Implicit considerations are also a part of lead scoring and include how often the prospect visits your site, if they download a white paper, if they subscribe to a blog or email newsletter and how recently this contact was made. By combining implicit and explicit information, good marketers can infer how likely a prospect is to buy in the near future.
The effectiveness of lead scoring is really seen on the sales level. Keep in mind that this process is not always perfect at first; it may need to be tweaked in order to produce the best results. Salespeople should keep track of the length of time it takes them to turn a lead into a customer and whether or not the lead scoring done on that client was accurate. Each time the potential customer is contacted, detailed notes should be recorded as well. Having this information will help the marketing department adjust their lead scoring efforts as needed.
Using lead scoring to prioritize your B2B company’s online marketing and sales is a smart decision. This makes your sales team more efficient and helps them increase revenue with new clients. Instead of wasting time with potential clients that are simply browsing your products and services, lead scoring lets your sales team focus on clients who are ready to buy now.
Ray Perry is an Internet marketing executive with more than 25 years of experience. He is the Chief Marketing Officer at MarketBlazer, a small business marketing company and authorized Duct Tape Marketing coach. You can get more information about lead scoring at www.MarketBlazer.com.
categories: lead scoring,priority leads,priority leads first
