Whether you’re working in construction or sales, every job has tools of the trade. The tools a sales team uses are different than the tools a construction team uses, but in both cases, you need to have the best tools to do the job right. You need to make sure lead scoring is in your tool belt.
Lead scoring lets you spend more time talking to people who have shown interest in your organization and less time dialing out of the phone book. Lead scoring gives you better leads to call, resulting in better calls and more closes.
A lead score is a prediction of how much you want to call a prospect. If a prospect has a high lead score, you should give him a call. If a prospect has a low lead score, you should call other prospects first.
When you implement lead scoring, you will be able to view a list of all your prospects and sort them from the highest lead score to the lowest. All you need to do after that is start calling from the top of the list.
Building a Lead Score
There are two components to lead scoring:
- A prospect’s profile
- A prospect’s interactions with marketing content
Prospect’s Profile
You probably have an ideal prospect who is the more likely than other prospect to want to buy your product. Maybe that means you would rather call prospects from Ohio more than prospects from Nebraska. You might prefer to talk to CFOs instead of CMOs. You might also have a preferred budget in mind when making calls.
Some kinds of information you might want to consider include
- Location,
- Job title,
- Budget, and
- Industry.
You can use the information you have in your database to give prospects who match your ideal prospect a jump start on accumulating a lead score by giving them points before the lead scoring process even begins. On the flip side of that, you can make it harder for prospects who don’t match your desired profile to accumulate a lead score by starting them at a negative score.
Prospect’s Interactions
Once you have your profiles set up, start sending marketing content out to your prospect database. Every time prospects interact with your content, their lead score will increase. Types of content you can use for lead scoring include
- White papers,
- Emails,
- Website pages,
- Sell sheets,
- Webinars,
- Or practically anything else you send out online.
Different interactions mean more to you than others, though. For instance, if someone attends a webinar you run, that person is more likely to be interested in your product than someone who just opened up an email one time. To account for this, you should set different scores to different types of interaction.
The more predictive an interaction is of a prospect’s interest level, the more points that interaction should accumulate for the prospect.
You should also pick a threshold score at which a prospect should receive a call. You might decide, for instance, that your threshold is 15. That means that once a prospect accumulates a lead score of 15, you should pick up the phone and give that person a call.
Laying the Foundation
There are a few things you need before you start scoring leads.
Compelling Marketing Content
If you want to score prospects based on how they interact with your marketing content, you need to have interesting and engaging content to send prospects. Without effective content, your lead scores won’t get off the ground.
Distribution Methods
After you develop great content, you need to make sure it gets seen. Using the right distribution methods makes all the difference when you are trying to get content in front of prospects to drive interactions and get lead scores higher.
Effective CRM Management
Lead scoring can only be useful if you have well maintained lists to put into your lead scoring program. The more organized and thorough the data your have on prospects, the better your lead scoring program will work.
CRM management is also important on the other end of lead scoring. A well managed CRM should give you an easy to view list of your prospects’ lead scores, making it easy to pick up the phone and start talking to warm leads.
Building Your Sales Numbers
What’s your ROI on the time you spend making sales calls? The average lead generation ROI for organization using a lead scoring process is 138% (MarketingSherpa – Jan 2012).
Get more value out of the time you spend making sales calls by using lead scoring. When implemented with engaging content, effective distribution methods, and a well-managed CRM, you can expect to get more out of your time spent making sales calls.
