More Benefits of Lead Scoring
The benefits of lead scoringprove why it's relevant, so we made sure to clearly list them. There's a whole other article detailing the benefits of lead scoring. It fully explores the top 5 reasons for using the technique to improve your business, which include:
- Focus on opportunities that matter.
- Increase productivity.
- Align marketing and sales.
- Better understand your clients.
- Improve sales experience for lasting client relationships.
Getting Started with Lead Scoring
So, we know what lead scoring is, we know what it can do, and we like the many benefits of scoring leads. Now we figure out how to get started with it. There's an initial decision to make—manual or predictive lead scoring?
Understanding Manual and Predictive Lead Scoring
Manual lead scoring means thinking ahead, sorting through a lot of data to assign values, and maybe pulling out your ruler to make a line chart. Lead scoring manually can be effective, but it will probably take a lot of time and get complicated quickly. Otherwise, there is predictive lead scoring that uses artificial intelligence by applying machine learning.
More about Predictive Lead Scoring
By using predictive modeling, you'll be taking advantage of lead scoring techniques even further. This list of ways artificial intelligence transforms CRMs is a good read that explains the additional perks of predictive versus manual lead scoring. Not only can artificial intelligence work with larger data sets, we know it gets smarter the more it is used.
Predictive Scoring Can Mean Active Learning
Active learning features from an automation platform means that the more the tool is used, the more it understands the correlations to success. And as the name suggests, it actively adapts to improve accuracy. Meaning, predictive lead scoring can do what manual methods cannot, which makes it really worth consideration.
How Machine Learning Works in Predictive Lead Scoring
Here's a simple example, take into consideration two behavioral data points like email opens and content downloads. You can imagine the people who open more of your business's emails and download more of your business's content online are more likely to be leads that develop into clients. Once all leads are identified, they can be ranked by a probability score for closing.
Machine Assistance Helps with the Exponential Increase of Data
Data points that are as easy and straightforward as email opens and content downloads can be done manually. But business is more nuanced than that. Once you start adding in additional complex information, you'll be thankful for predictive lead scoring. Machine learning tools can analyze and present the information you're looking for and save you lots of time.
Sales and Marketing Collaboration is Key
Multi-departmental cooperation is one of the best ways to utilize lead scoring. Sales teams don't have leads to follow up on without the work of marketing teams. And marketing teams can focus on relevant content with insights and feedback from salespeople. Integrating sales and marketing departments as you utilize lead scoring will only further enhance the technique.
Take Advantage of Your Data
The key to lead scoring is taking advantage of all the valuable client data you already have. Spending a bit of time going over records can help break down demographic and behavioral information. These are the relevant data points that will build into successful lead scoring methods. To further understand the value of data, look into this article about Data as a Service and consulting firms.
To break it down even more, we can broadly examine some of the key data points out of the billions of signals that can be relevant. Demographic information may include location, age, company size, department, industry, or job title. Behavior information may include email opens, email subscriptions, site visits, demo requests, content downloads, or other online engagement.
Automate Complicated Data Collection
Lead scoring is another way to automate the sales process and we know how effective sales automation can be. Looking at the behavior data points, like site visits or content downloads, can be tedious if not impossible to manually track and record. This is where automation and artificial intelligence can really change what salespeople can do with their workflows.
Lead Scoring And Sales Automation Supports Expert Salespeople
In other articles, we reviewed _what makes sales automation so impactful (https://aptiv.io/the-ultimate-guide-to-sales-automation), particularly how it saves time and uses resources more wisely so salespeople can focus on customer relationships. Lead scoring does just the same, it means working more efficiently by taking advantage of company data and focusing on objectively promising leads.
Lead Scoring Helps Across Industries
In deciding if lead scoring will help your business, it helps to review which industries it can be most influential. For enterprise software, lead scoring can mean the difference in knowing everything you need for success and not having all of the information available. In this case, a market monitoring feature from a CRM optimized service can help with that as it builds intelligent profiles of target leads.
Business advisory is another industry that benefits by using lead scoring. Similar to software, it is important for business advisory firms to evaluate opportunities using lead scoring techniques. Not only to evaluate opportunities and risk, but to employ the ideal sales strategy depending on the clients.
Integrating Lead Scoring into Sales and Marketing
As we know, just because something is available, it doesn't mean it will actually get used. A great technique like lead scoring will fall flat if never accepted by departments or teams. Fortunately, with platforms like Salesforce and artificially intelligent tools that complement CRM, lead scoring is easily integrated into workflows by sales and marketing teams.
Maintain Lead Scoring Success with Regular Review
Sincelead scoring relies on the valuable demographic and behavioral data points, it is important to ensure that the information stays up to date. Any unanticipated trends that create new patterns about your leads should be taken into account when scoring. Analyzing the latest information will ensure your lead scoring methods are still effective. And when all of the data points are overwhelming, you can always try artificially intelligent tools to help you process.
