You’ve been working hard at B2B lead generation. Your marketing strategies are paying off and you're seeing a steady stream of leads coming in. This is a great place to be for any company.

But lead generation isn’t just about the quantity of leads that you have. It’s also about the quality of your leads.

You need to identify the best and most profitable prospects so you can focus your attention and resources on converting them.

If you don’t put in place ways to target the best leads and ensure that your sales department can reach out to them at the right time, you can face two problems.

First, you overwhelm your sales reps with low-quality leads or prospects who aren’t ready to buy. This lowers morale and impedes success.

Second, you miss vital steps in your sales process and lose genuinely excellent opportunities. Perhaps sales can’t see them because of all the low-quality leads coming through. Or maybe your quality leads fall through the cracks and don’t receive the attention that might nudge them over the line.

The solution to your problems is lead scoring.

In this article, we’re going to discuss what lead scoring is and how to set up a lead generation process. We'll also cover why marketing automation is the key to ensuring you capture and nurture your best leads along the customer journey and increase your conversion rate.

What is lead scoring?

Lead scoring is the process of adding a numerical value to each lead, based on who they are and their interactions with your business.

You can score leads manually, but it takes time. It can also be difficult to ensure you’ve taken all factors into account and gathered all the information you need about them.

With automated lead scoring, however, your marketing platform assigns numerical values to all of your leads automatically. Your marketing software does this based on the attributes, actions, and behaviours you specify as important.

As each lead enters and works their way through the sales cycle, your marketing automation platform will continually update their score and keep track of where they are in the customer journey.

When qualified leads reach a certain score, you can pass them on to your sales team. Or you can let your automation software do that for you.

That way, only the high-quality, qualified leads pass through for your sales team to progress. They can then focus on dealing with only the people who are most likely to convert.

The benefits of automated lead scoring

Sales and marketing alignment: Introducing lead scoring is a perfect way to encourage your sales and marketing teams into closer alignment. Both departments need to work closely together to create a system that is able to deliver benefits across the board. You cannot do this effectively when these departments are siloed.

Resource management: The lead scoring process helps both sales and marketing see where customers are on their buying journey and how close they are to making a buying decision. This allows everyone to manage their time and resources well.

It helps marketing to target their campaigns and allows sales to focus their time on closing deals. It makes it easier for sales to see buying signals and notifies them to get in touch with the customer. It can even trigger an automated workflow that sends qualifying prospects an email suggesting a sales call or a demo.

Customer journey management: Analysis of the customer journey, and of when and where leads convert or stall, can also help to diagnose and correct any issues in your pipeline. When you optimise based on the actions taken by good leads, your conversion rate increases, leading to a better ROI and increased profits.

Customer experience: Lead scoring can also help to create a smoother, more engaging customer experience. Automated segmentation and triggering workflows based on a lead’s score ensure they receive the right content at the right time. You’re also not approaching customers before they’re ready for a conversation, so they never feel pushed towards a sale prematurely.

Lead scoring allows you to take a step back and give people the space to engage in the self-service journey B2B customers increasingly want. You create a minimal friction, educative experience that eases the route to making a purchase, and customers who feel more taken care of and listened to at each stage. If you want to lay the groundwork for creating post-sale brand advocates, this is the way to go about it.

The foundations of a lead scoring system

It’s not enough to have even a full automated marketing platform. While marketing automation tools can work wonders for any business, you still need to make the right decisions yourself and look at what you want in a lead.

Who is a quality lead?

Your first step, before you get to lead scoring, is to define what a quality lead looks like. This is different for every business, so we can’t give you hard and fast rules here, but we can help with what to look at. You can develop and tweak what you’re looking for in a lead as you go, so don’t think this is decided once and set in stone.

Start by looking at your buyer personas and remind yourself who your ideal customer is. Your buyer personas tell you what sort of companies you are looking for, the job title of the person likely to be making buying decisions, demographics, and much more.

All of this information helps the system to ‘upvote’ leads from those types of companies, that specific location, and the type of person who can make a buying decision. Other factors to include could be company size in terms of employees or turnover that they can afford what you offer.

Next, get your sales and marketing departments working together. Go into detail about who they are targeting and who is in your highest converting segments.

Look at your existing customers in detail. Find out when and why they bought, which are repeat customers, your highest value customers. Also find out who your least successful accounts are. If you know your highest value contracts are with pharma companies in the UK, this is the first thing you need to specify when lead scoring.

Along with analytics from social media, your website, and your marketing software, you will be able to build up a detailed picture of exactly the type of person who buys from you and the ideal prospects you need to pull out of the pile.

The signs of a quality lead

You will get visitors to your site and interactions on social media for a variety of reasons. Not all of them will be leads. You need to weed out genuine leads and, in particular leads who are further along the customer journey and ready to buy. 

How they found you

A sign of a potential lead is that they’ve come through to you via a campaign you’re running. If you’ve targeted your campaigns correctly, then most of the people you’re attracting should be worth tracking to find out more. 

Besides seeing where visitors have come from via your analytics, ask them how they heard about you if and when they fill out lead capture and contact forms. This also has the advantage that you can see which campaigns are working and which are not.

Priority interactions

Look at your prospects’ behaviours on your website, social media, and with any ads you’ve placed. 

Have they been reading your content? If so, what sort of content are they interested in?

Have they signed up for your email list? Have they clicked through on any of your calls to action?

Do they engage with you on your blog and leave comments, ask questions, interact with you on Facebook Lives, and other indicators?

Look at every aspect of your digital marketing, assigning points for each event. Interactions that show a deepening interest in the offer or sales readiness receive a higher score.

For example, if you have a lead who has subscribed to your email list or downloaded your white paper, they might be interested in what you have to offer. They could also be a content creator or competitor researching your marketing efforts.

However, if they have invested time in attending a webinar or have booked a demo, it’s a safe bet that they’re worth following up!

Look out for these potential lead scoring criteria:

• Repeatedly visiting your website or interacting on social media.

• Clicking on important pages, such as your pricing page, contact us, and your FAQ.

• Watching product demo videos.

• Using your chatbot to ask pre-sales questions.

• Clicking through to buy links or CTAs from your emails.

Negative lead scoring

You should also include criteria for when to apply negative scores to leads to ensure that you don’t have any false positives.

For example, someone might visit your website frequently, but only visit your careers page. If so, are they more likely to be a prospective employee or a recruitment consultant than a lead? 

You also need to down score leads who unsubscribe from your email list, or leads who have stopped interacting with you and haven’t responded to a re-engagement campaign.

Automation tools

If you’re wondering why you need automation tools to help with lead scoring, then just imagine trying to keep track of every single variable and every interaction each of your leads has with you 365 days a year and 24/7. Do you really have the resources to do that manually? Even if you do, couldn’t their time be better used more creatively?

A good marketing platform such as SharpSpring, the platform we use, can automatically apply scores based on the information supplied and tracked behaviours.

An integrated platform provides a range of tools that can ease your leads through the customer journey and lead them to a buying decision.

Landing pages and lead capture forms

You can set up individual landing pages for specific offers and forms to capture information about your leads. Dynamic form fields give you the ability to build a picture of each lead over time using progressive profiling.

CRM and Life of the Lead

You can build up lead profiles automatically using your software, but also add additional information to your CRM manually. You can pull in information from social media, track any sales calls you’ve had with them, and see where they are on the buyer’s journey in the Life of the Lead records.

Automated segmentation of leads into lists

Automation allows you to segment your leads based on their score so you can deliver the right content at the right time for each individual. This might mean delivery of sales content via email once they’ve passed a particular threshold, or adding them to a list for re-targeting ads at an earlier stage. This allows you to target your marketing much more effectively and tailor the customer journey to suit each lead’s needs.

Dynamic content

You can also use dynamic content to personalise each lead’s experience in both your emails and on landing pages. Personalisation helps to build rapport and trust, and can nurture their interest in your company. Imagine being able to present each person with a web page tailored to their level of interest, their customer profile, as well as the information they’ve been searching for.

Sales notifications

Finally, you can define your lead score threshold beyond which you deem highly interested leads to be ‘marketing qualified leads’ and suitable to pass to sales.

This allows you to separate out your most valuable leads and send them on to your sales department to follow up automatically. You can also trigger email workflows based on a lead score threshold and invite people to book a call through the website. Sales can then take the interaction forward with a more personal touch at the right time to convert. 

What do you do with lower-quality leads?

You don’t need to lose any leads just because they’re not ready to buy now, or because their score is lower than your threshold. Automation can help here too. 

Instead of having to guess which leads aren’t quite ready, but might be with a little more lead nurturing, you’ll know who is in this group. You can then continue to build the relationship with targeted, effective marketing including emails, content, social media interactions, and paid advertising.

You’ll also be able to review each lead and decide that they’re unlikely to convert no matter what you do and choose to disengage.

What do you do with stalled leads?

Anyone who is no longer engaged can be followed up by email or by remarketing. You can run a complete re-engagement campaign to get them interested again. You can also set up follow-up notifications to your sales team so that they know if a lead has stalled and action needs to be taken.

Visualise your pipeline

With the right software and processes in place, you don’t have to be in a situation where your sales and marketing teams are in the dark. 

A marketing automation platform allows you to plot out your customer journey and see a visual representation of your sales pipeline so you have sight of all of your opportunities.

If you would like to find out more about how lead scoring can work to speed up your sales pipeline, get in touch for a demo.