As you know, a lead is a sales opportunity. That is, that contact that you have in your database (because he has subscribed to your newsletter, for example, or has downloaded a guide or an ebook from your website). The point is that you have their email in your possession and now it’s time to convert that lead into a customer. Would you know where to start? Let’s see it together!
Lead scoring means nothing more than scoring these leads to find out which ones are more likely to become buyers of our products or services. And you may be wondering, what about the leads that are not yet potential buyers? Of course, you don’t have to forget about them! Just keep working on a lead nurturing strategy
lead nurturing
by impacting them through email marketing until you think it is convenient to take a step further in your relationship.
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The lead scoring methodology as a complement of lead nurturing
The lead scoring is not a separate strategy, but it is totally complementary to lead nurturing and, therefore, it is included in the
Inbound Marketing methodology
.
During a lead scoring strategy it is very important that marketing and sales teams communicate and weave this strategy together. This symbiosis is what is known as Smarketing, the moment when these two teams, apparently so different, work together to achieve the final sale which, after all, is the goal of every company.
What will it bring you to work with a lead scoring methodology? Save time, since you will only invest your resources in those leads that are potential buyers and postpone contacting the others until later.
How will we score leads? Explicit lead scoring.
Of course, you may be wondering how you will recognize which leads are most likely to become customers and how you can do this scoring. Let’s see it!
On the one hand, we have the information that the lead has provided us with, for example, through a form. What kind of information are we interested in?
Let’s say you are a B2C company, i.e. you sell your product directly to an end consumer. Depending on the type of product you sell, your ideal target will be included within certain age parameters or will live in a certain country to be able to purchase your product, among many other options. Then, according to this data, you will be able to discard those users who are not potential buyers of your product right now.
On the other hand, we may be talking about a B2B company. Here, for example, you will be interested in asking the lead ‘s profession or the position he/she holds in his/her company through the forms. If he does not have decision-making power in his company, he will not be a potential buyer of your product or service, and he may not have influence over those who could.
The same applies to their income. Depending on the profession of your lead, you will be able to deduct if he/she has enough income to purchase your service (if we are talking about an expensive product or service).
Or, perhaps, we are talking about a lead that does not need your product and has simply entered your system because he was interested in that particular content you were offering. It could also be a student, for example.
We can summarize these last paragraphs in what we call explicit lead scoring (information provided by the user himself). In addition to the demographic data discussed above, these are the characteristics you should look for through this more specific data: Budget (does the lead have a budget for your product? authority (does he/she have the decision-making power to purchase it?), need (does he/she need your product or service?) and time (is it the right time to make the purchase?).
Shall we do some research? Implicit lead scoring.
On the other hand, as it could not be otherwise, we have the implicit lead scoring, in which you will have to carry out a much more exhaustive work of research and, above all, observation. Implicit lead scoring is simply a matter of observing the behavior of users on our website. Are they visiting the same Landing Page many times? Have you put a product in your shopping cart several times but then backed out at the last minute? All these actions are important to perform a correct lead scoring.
What should you take into account to score these implicit lead scoring actions? The moment of buyer’s journey The type of email in which the user is, the type of email they are interested in, the type of content they are visiting on your website, if they have already tried to contact you directly or make an online purchase… Each action will have a different score, depending on its importance.
There are very interesting and useful tools such as HubSpot to provide you with this type of information. Performing this search without a good CRM prepared to work with Inbound Marketing can be a real madness, not to say impossible. That is why we encourage you to continue reading this
article
in which we talk about the importance of CRM.
