August 8, 2023
August 8, 2023
Running a SaaS business can be hectic, especially when it comes to shortlisting your leads before you reach them. These target accounts are your potential customers who would possibly be interested in your product and use it in the future. But once you have enough leads, how do you ensure that you are reaching out to the right people and differentiate among leads who are actually interested from those who are still just snooping around?
Well, the simple answer is to use Lead Scoring!
Lead scoring is a method that can help you filter out the accounts that you can engage with. It allows you to draw a parallel comparison of your target accounts with your Ideal Customer Profile, and assess their relevance and suitability. For instance, if you are developing an HR product and your Ideal Customer Profile is a company that has an HR team of more than one person, a career page, and more than 5 job openings, you should score all your leads based on these attributes and focus on the ones that get the highest score.
Before we delve into the details of how to use Lead Scoring, it would be helpful to understand the phenomenon a little more.
What is Lead Scoring?
The process of allocating a numerical value to every lead that your business has generated is known as Lead Scoring. You can use different factors to score your leads against. These attributes could be related to the professional information of your leads and how they react to your content on your website or across the Internet. Lead scoring is an efficient way of prioritizing your leads by your marketing and sales teams. It also helps you decide how to interact with these leads appropriately and increase the chances of turning such leads into customers.
Different businesses can have different attributes that can be used in assigning scores to their leads. Some of the main attributes that can be used in your value system to identify your marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are as follows:
There are also other explicit and implicit data points that are ranked in the order of their importance while giving a score to a lead. Other attributes that you can use to score your leads can be related to the actions that a potential customer might take during their customer journey. These actions could be in the form of:
Your lead scoring system can assign different points to every attribute that you deem important to your business against a threshold number ‘x’. When a lead reaches the threshold point, your sales team can identify it as a hot lead and contact them immediately. This way the sales team would stay more focused and informed about who and when to reach someone. For the leads that do not make it up to the threshold score, you retrieve them back to the marketing team and nurture them more until they qualify as an MQL.
Why should you use Lead Scoring?
Now if you might be wondering why should one take the arduous task of scoring leads, let’s have a look at what potential benefits can it bring to your business.
Lead Scoring helps you identify leads that are ready to make the purchase. It is likely that if your sales rep would contact leads that are not ready, they would retract away. On the other hand, if you reach out to prospects that are far ahead in the sales process and seem to be ready for your product or service, chances are that they would turn into customers. Lead Scoring is a good way to differentiate between leads that are ready and those that need further nurturing.
Lead Scoring promotes coordination between marketing and sales teams in order to meet your business goals. The two teams work in harmony to highlight the profile of sales-ready leads. It is critical to understand which types of leads convert to customers. Consequently, the marketing team can target these leads with personalized campaigns and forward them to the sales team when they are ready to close the deal.
Time is money! You can save money when your sales team is not wasting time on leads that are not ready yet. Instead, they can use their time effectively to communicate with leads that are genuinely interested in making the purchase. Lead Scoring also makes the customer experience better as you can provide relevant content to your leads based on their position in the customer journey. Prospects that are not ready yet would not move away because you would not approach them too soon in the process.
How to use Lead Scoring to shortlist leads?
Lead Scoring might seem like a simple process but it can quickly become complicated if you try to score your leads manually as there are many attributes that you might be using to rank your leads. It gets even more complicated when you have to revise your scoreboard regularly based on your leads’ behavioral data.
RevenueOS.io is bringing you an automation tool that can help you with Lead Scoring using both explicit and implicit data points regarding the leads that you might be interested in.
Let’s have a quick overview of how to implement Lead Scoring.
There are three types of Lead Scoring:
1. Prospect Scoring:
The first and foremost thing is to score leads from outbound marketing which would include prospects that the business can gather from sending a message to a large audience. The strategies used in the process to increase brand awareness could include:
After you have reached a certain number of prospects, it is time to analyze their profiles against your Ideal Customer Profile and find more accounts related to the segment your company is going to focus on. For finding similar leads, you can generate a list of companies and score them according to their firmographic, psychological, and intent data. There could be different scenarios for different companies. For example, if your company is meant to help other companies hire software engineers, you should target companies that have active job openings for software engineers. You should also focus more on smaller companies or startups because it would be easier for bigger enterprises to find a match for themselves. Once a list of target accounts against your Ideal Customer Profile has been finalized, these prospects can be assigned the scores according to your Lead Scoring value system.
2. Trial Scoring:
We use an exhaustive system to rank your leads based on inbound marketing which provides data regarding your online content and social media engagement. The purpose is to spread brand awareness through content generation that could motivate people to:
After taking these actions, they may make the purchase if they deem your product right. Someone who spends 10 minutes on your website and visits five pages of your content is a more valuable lead than one that just visits once and bounces. Leads are scored on the basis of such actions and interactions with your online presence to ensure that you have a better idea of the prospects’ buying intent and make more informed decisions. For instance,
3. Customer Scoring:
Scoring does not stop after you have converted a lead. Customer scoring starts with the usage of your product during the trial period. You assign scores based on the number of customers who opt to use your product once the trial period is over. Moreover, customer scoring is done to evaluate if the customer is regularly using your product. Customer churn prediction is critical for any business as any lost customer means a loss of revenue. Customer churn could be a result of poor customer service or the customer witching to a competitor, etc. With customer scoring, you can predict if the customer is headed towards a churn and you can prevent that by catering to their needs on time.
Final Word
Lead Scoring is not an easy task, yet it remains one of the most vital strategies to predict leads that are ready to convert. Ranking your leads is not a new concept, however, with the current marketing scenario where there are a variety of attributes to be checked before making a decision, Lead Scoring can become tricky. With the help of an automation tool, such as the one provided by RevenueOS.io, Lead Scoring can become more manageable and provide you with a more precise set of data that you can use to take the next step.
Connect with Us!
Feel free to book an appointment with us and find out how we can help your business with finding and scoring leads that can help you reach the right accounts. Our team would be more than happy to help and listen to your needs!
Let’s discuss your current process and explore customized automation solutions with RevenueOS.io
