Understanding Lead Scoring and its Benefits for a Business

Lead nurturing and scoring is crucial for businesses as not all leads are created equal. You might often hear the leads being referred to as “cold,” “warm,” or “hot.” To ensure that a business is not wasting their efforts on a cold or unqualified lead they are required to adopt a process that scores the lead’s level of interest and sales readiness.

Lead Scoring Services

The process that allows one to assign a score to a lead’s level of sales readiness is called lead scoring. This method is utilized by companies to score leads by using rankings and allocating points to define the quality of a lead.
Lead scoring assigns values to leads based on their purchasing behavior and likelihood to prefer a product or service. These values differ from company to company but are usually categorized with the level of interest shown towards a particular company or brand. So the sales and marketing teams will be able to focus their efforts towards the leads that have been assigned a higher score or that are most qualified.
Moreover, depending on the marketing strategy, a brand may choose to move to the next category once they have exhausted their efforts on qualified leads.
Following are some important lead scoring terms:

BANT

BANT stands for Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline. These attributes are utilized to define the sales readiness of a lead.

Explicit data

Explicit data is information that a customer provides which is not open to interpretation like title, company, and industry, and company size.

Implicit data

Implicit data is data that reveals the customer’s online behavior such as pages visited and the frequency of such visits.

Multiple scoring

Multiple scoring allows a business to allot more than one score to a lead. This is useful for companies with various products or campaigns that have to be managed separately.

Product score

Product score indicates a lead’s level of interest in a particular product and the company can create multiple product scores, one for each product they offer.

Sales-Ready Leads (SRLs) or Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

Sales-ready lead score lets the sales team identify which leads are “hottest” and ripe for sales interaction. Higher sales-ready scores highlight that the lead is ready to make a purchase and hence should be readily approached and nurtured through the sales cycle.

The Benefits of Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is beneficial to any lead nurturing program. Some customers are more prepared than others throughout the buying cycle. So it is up to the sales and marketing teams to recognize which leads are the most willing to make a purchase and are required to be nurtured. For this reason, lead scoring is essential for ascertaining lead quality that improves sales, marketing efforts and productivity. Focusing on leads that have low value in lead scoring system causes wastage of valuable resources of your business. So, it is better to head wisely and smartly with a proper lead scoring strategy to ultimately leverage business engagement and boost sales.

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