Lead scoring is not a new concept – It’s been around for more than a decade now. From the start, it’s been used by sales and marketing teams to determine if a lead is sales-ready or if it needs to be nurtured.
In most corporations, the marketing team generates leads and the sales team closes deals. However, nowadays thanks to software , an outbound sales team can also generate quality leads. Indeed, sales reps can easily find prospects within a database of 200 million decision-makers. The implication is that an outbound sales team can find a good fit more easily. However, not every lead a team generates is responsive. Some need to be nurtured while others are sales-ready. For this reason, even if you target the right leads, it’s a good idea to have a lead scoring system in place.
Not having a lead scoring system in place to assess lead quality can translate into:
- Wasted resources
- The loss of a potential customer
- Lower conversion rates
- Slow response times
Wasted resources
Engaging with a bad lead comes at a cost. It takes up time that you could spend building a relationship with a good lead.
To avoid wasting resources, your demand generation team should take over and write outbound email campaigns, send them to your target customers, and score the level of engagement of the leads. In this way, they can select which leads should be nurtured and which are sales-ready.
Regardless of whether it is the demand generation or the sales team that sends the outbound emails, it is important to track them and analyze the behavior of the prospects. Once the tool you’re using has identified the “hot leads,” you can engage and follow up with these leads in a more personalized email campaign. Thus your sales team only focuses on positive responses and stops wasting time following up.
The loss of a potential customer
Engaging with a lead that needs to be nurtured and that is not sales-ready will result in the loss of a potential customer. This is another reason why it is important to use a lead scoring system. If not, your sales team will incur a double loss: a loss of both time and a potential client.
Lower conversion rates
Lead scoring is also effective at detecting new client interests. For instance, if one of your clients buys a product but then shows interest in another product, then your lead scoring system will detect this and inform the sales team. This allows them to ensure a timely follow-up and take advantage of potential cross-sells and upsells.
Unsatisfactory timeliness of response
According to the Demand Gen report, the timeliness of a vendor’s response to inquiries is the number one reason why buyers choose a winning vendor. This means that the sales team needs to know on the spot which lead has turned hot so that they can follow up in a timely manner and not lose the deal.
Difference between predictive lead scoring and traditional lead scoring
The main goal of lead scoring is to qualify leads. With traditional lead scoring, the marketing team, with the help of the sales team, needs to set out a series of qualifying factors that will define if a lead is qualified for that business. Some examples of possible criteria are demographics, website visits, and email clickthroughs. Points are assigned to key criteria, and it is possible to both add points and decrease points. For example, if the lead hits a specific number of visits you can add +10 points. Depending on the score of the lead you will then either transfer it to the sales team or nurture it.
Predictive lead scoring makes life easier for the sales and marketing teams, by aligning them more closely. For instance, it is a lead scoring algorithm that predicts who in your database is qualified or not qualified. Of course, different tools will take into account different information when predicting the score.
In conclusion, while an outbound sales team is able to generate very targeted leads thanks to the use of sales prospecting tools, it is still important to have a lead scoring system that helps you boost productivity and ultimately close more deals.
Source: B2C
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