Ask any entrepreneur, marketer, or business developer. They’ll tell you that by far the majority of the work that goes into closing a sale comes during the “prospecting” phase.
This involves using the right marketing techniques in order to reach out to the masses. With each person who’s become aware of your product, you have a potential lead.
These leads now enter a marketing funnel. This is a path with many doors–some a way out, some even right into a competitor’s own marketing funnel.
Not only this, but we know the goal of sales is always more. More leads mean more potential customers. More customers mean more potential sales. More sales mean a higher revenue stream. Not long after the pool of leads dries up, so does the revenue stream.
How can you prevent this?
By making sure you are focusing your attention on the leads of greatest value–those with the highest propensity to take action.
This is where lead scoring comes in.
The right lead scoring software will attribute values to specific behaviours and what actions these behaviours most often lead to. This allows you to quantify the cause and effect relationship between your marketing techniques and those they are reaching.
Let’s take a look at some crucial lead scoring metrics that you’ll want access to as you consider which scoring software would work best for you.
Effectively using these lead scoring methodologies will give you the ability to track leads of the greatest value and be on your way to boosting sales and creating predictable growth.
How did your lead start his or her journey down your marketing funnel? Were they using a mobile device or a desktop when they became aware of your product?
Tracking the technology leads are using when they enter that funnel is key to focusing on methods that target the greater number of people.
Based on what your product or service is, you can attribute greater value relative to the device used by a lead when they became aware of your product or service.
For example, if your business is software solutions, you would place a higher value on a lead that came across your product while using a desktop. However, if your business is retail home goods, you would place a higher value on a lead that became aware of your product while using a mobile device.
The reason for this is that you know someone using a desktop computer is more likely to be in need of software solutions than someone using a mobile device.
Similarly, with the increase in online shopping from smartphones and tablets, you know that someone using one of these devices is more likely to be looking to buy retail goods.
What did a lead click on that led them to the point of awareness?
You would likely place a higher value on a lead who gained this awareness through an organic search than on one who came across your business or product through social media. The reason being that the former action already shows a propensity towards being interested in the solution you have to offer.
Depending on the results of conversion metrics (we’ll get into that later), this could cause you to want to focus more on organic search marketing techniques, such as improved SEO.
Know who your leads are. Knowing what interests appeal to different demographics allows you to leverage this information to score higher-quality leads.
To do this, you will have to track an assortment of demographic data.
What are some of these data points you will be tracking?
Age. Is a lead’s age in line with who your product or service would likely appeal to?
Gender. Is your product or service generally directed more at one specific gender over the other?
Race. Are there specific races or ethnicities that show a greater propensity for being drawn towards what you offer?
Profession. Is your solution clearly going to benefit certain professions over others?
For example, say you sell cybersecurity solutions. Who would you attribute a higher lead score to in this case: an IT specialist or a vehicle mechanic? The IT specialist would, of course, have a greater likelihood of needing your product. But what about if you operate an online tool retail store? The inverse would then be true.
Income. Does a lead’s income make them more or less likely to become your customer?
For example, say you sell private sailboats. No matter how engaged someone is with your business, you probably aren’t going to attribute a high lead score to them if they fall into a lower-income bracket.
However if someone appears to have a high amount of disposable income, you would place a greater lead score on them–even if they don’t have the same level of engagement as the former example.
Job Title. What does a lead’s job title tell you about their ability to make actionable choices?
For this example, say you offer a web hosting platform.
You are tracking two different leads, one with the job title of “marketing manager” and another with the title “marketing associate”. Now suppose both have the same engagement levels. Which option would you attribute a higher lead valuation?
The marketing manager of course because they would be the one more likely to be the decision-maker.
If you offer B2B solutions, another metric worth tracking is firmographics.
These are quite similar to demographics in that they target specific qualities. The difference is where demographics focuses on describing people, firmographics focuses on describing businesses and organizations.
Some of the similar data points you would track are:
Scoring behavioural patterns is a great way to figure out which past actions taken by leads led to which results. This allows you to hone your strategy and focus on improving the options that have had the most positive effect.
Some of these actionable options you’ll want to score are:
For a lead to engage in one or more of these behaviours indicates a greater propensity towards becoming a customer and so should get scored accordingly.
This essentially measures the quality of interest. No two visits to your website are the same. Because of that, you’ll want a way to gauge interests levels of those who do become aware of what you offer.
One of the primary ways to score this is by tracking the amount of time a lead spends engaging in some way with your site and marketing content.
This will keep you from focusing on a lead who gets an email newsletter, clicks to your landing page, and then immediately leaves. Instead, you would want to direct your attention to the lead that followed the same process but then spent several minutes checking out your site.
You’re distributing content on many fronts. You keep an active blog, send out email newsletters, advertise on social media, and even offer free ebooks. Now you want to know what content is of the greatest value.
By using lead scoring stats, you can see which specific pieces of content have the highest engagement. This allows you to hone your attention on enhancing the quality of such content.
Doing so will create higher probabilities of lead conversion.
Behavioural metrics show you the pattern leading to success. Engagement measures quality of interest. Content tracking tells you what marketing methods to focus on.
Conversion tracking takes all of these factors into account and shows you how much success they had.
Upon seeing the results of your lead scoring methodologies, you will have data that can be applied towards future marketing efforts. This will boost your conversion rates and provide predictable growth.
Another metric of great value to your business as a whole is scoring leads according to revenue.
Conversion lead scoring stats tell you the rates of success among the leads who engaged with your content. But as someone running a business, you’ll want more information than that.
You want to know how much expense went into converting those leads into actionable customers. This benefits your business by allowing you to further refine your marketing process to achieve the best results at the lowest cost per lead conversion.
Knowing what leads are moving closer to conversion and what is influencing them to do so is important. So is knowing what leads are moving further away from this goal and why.
While certain actions show a propensity towards becoming a customer, others indicate a clear lack of interest. Consider attributing a negative score to such actions as:
By doing so, you will preserve you and your sales staff’s valuable time and keep it from being wasted.
We can see that no matter what product or service you offer, how to get better quality leads is partially dependent on utilizing a lead scoring software.
Just how much of an impact can incorporating the right lead scoring metrics have on your business? According to a DemandGen report, 32% of respondents to their lead scoring survey reported seeing a rise in action-ready leads.
If you’re just starting to move in this direction and need help getting your business’ site off the ground, feel free to contact us so we can help!
Or, if you simply want more great online lead generation tips and help finding the right marketing software for your business, pay our blog a visit!
