It’s one of the most important yet misunderstood concepts in the marketing world, which explains why if you ask 10 marketing consultants or agencies “what is lead scoring?”, you might end up with 10 different answers. Heck, you might even get 11 (marketing people are a creative and inventive bunch).
And so, before we explore why you should care about lead scoring, let’s clarify the matter once and for all with a simple, definitive answer to: what is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is a method of ranking prospects based on their detected likelihood of converting into customers.
That’s pretty much it. If you were expecting a convoluted answer full of marketing jargon, we’re sorry. We don’t do that at Leap Clixx. The above lays the foundation for what you need to know.
Why You Should Care About Lead Scoring
Now that you know what lead scoring is, we can jump over to what really matters: why you should care. Below, we highlight the 4 key reasons:
1. Lead scoring helps feed your sales and marketing teams with the right type of leads. Specifically, sales qualified leads (SQLs) can be engaged by sales teams, and marketing qualified leads (MQLs) can be engaged by marketing teams.
2. Lead scoring lets you make smarter, faster investment and resource allocation decisions based on how your pipeline actually looks vs. how you assume it looks (or wish it looked).
For example, if your sales team complains that they’re spending too much time engaging prospects that aren’t near or in buy-ready mode, then you can adjust your lead scoring system accordingly, and create more marketing-level content to prime and develop prospects.
3. When it’s done right, lead scoring significantly improves both the volume of prospect data captured, as well as the quality of data. Your business will learn more about your target audiences/buyer personas, and can leverage this in a variety of ways: everything from promotional campaigns, to product development, to content management and more.
4. Lead scoring can achieve the unthinkable and perhaps even miraculous: sales and marketing teams live together in harmony and communicate effectively, because they clearly see that they’re both on the same team – and they both need to win to be successful.
For example, sales teams can route intelligence and insight to marketing teams based on interactions with prospects (e.g. “we’re getting lots of questions from prospects about whether the new product update is backwards-compatible. Maybe you can put together a web page, video or datasheet about this?”). And marketing teams can return the favor (e.g. “We’re really playing up the fact that the new product update is an industry first, so please hammer this messaging home in your communication with prospects and make sure they know it’s a key differentiator for us”).
Learn More
Now that you have a simple and clear answer to “what is lead scoring?”, and you know why you should care, the next step is to make this highly effective method work in your business. And the way to do that is clear: contact Leap Clixx!
We’ll work with you to develop and implement a customized and results-focused lead scoring system. We’ll also collaborate with your sales and marketing executives, managers and teams to ensure that your system is constantly optimized and doing what it's supposed to: filling your pipeline with qualified leads, and helping boost revenues and profits.
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Topics: Lead Generation
