Growing Your B2B Sales With Lead Scoring

Pitching to prospective clients, especially in the Business to Business (B2B) context is a labor-intensive and time-consuming task. It requires thorough research, preparation and investment of resources. Sales and marketing teams often have to pursue multiple prospects simultaneously to ensure that the firm is continuously supplied with orders and revenue flow is guaranteed.

But a single strategy will not suit all sales pitches as the business nature and needs vary from client to client. Some customers will be ready to give one time bulk orders, whereas some will place only small orders but at frequent intervals. There may also be existing customers to whom sales team would be trying to up-sell or cross-sell products. Some clients would only be seeking information for a purchase at a later date whereas some may have an immediate requirement. Each scenario demands a different sales CRM (Customer Relationship Management) approach.

With so many demands on them, how do the sales teams divide resources among prospects? How do they set their priorities or decide which deal is more valuable and viable on a realistic scale? The answer lies in the concept of lead scoring.

What is lead scoring?

Lead scoring is a method used by an organization to rank the businesses they would receive from their prospective clients. It represents how attractive a lead is to the sales team. The valuation is done by the firm’s sales or marketing team based on their perception of the prospect. So the lead scores given to a prospect by one company’s sales team may be quite different from the scores assigned by another.

A number of parameters are considered for this process. The first factor consists of the explicit details available about the client such as the type of company, its size and buying power. The second parameter is the set of implicit details – the response of the prospect and its level of interest shown in terms of sending product queries, visiting web page, filling out forms, downloading white paper, etc.

How is it done?

Before lead scoring can be done, marketing and sales team should agree upon whether the lead is worth spending attention on through a process called lead qualification. Evaluation of the engagement and fit of the lead through implicit and explicit factors are required for this. There are three steps to a lead becoming qualified:

• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – When a lead shows sufficient engagement in the business, it is qualified by the marketing team and passed on to the sales team.

• Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) – The next step is for the sales team to verify the information. It decides whether the lead should be sent back to the marketing department for re-evaluation and nurturing, discarded or accepted.  

• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – After sales team accepts the lead, it is subjected to one more round of evaluation. The explicit details of the prospective client are verified, whether it is the right fit for the business or not.

Qualified leads can then be scored. For this, the sales and marketing team needs to come up with a set of criteria and a weighted system of scoring by sound experience and logic. It should be based on a combination of both the explicit and implicit details; the systems are called demographic and behavioral scorings, respectively. Generally, a point based system working on a scale of 0 backed to 100 is adopted.

Lead scoring should also be dynamic. Every time the prospect takes a relevant action, the score should change accordingly. This often includes a negative marking system as well where points are deducted when a lead take an action that shows a reduction in engagement.

Managing these huge volumes of data manually would be close to impossible. CRM softwares enabled with lead management tools would make this process simple and effective.

Benefits of lead scoring for the growth of B2B sales

Lead scoring is a useful tool in accelerating the growth of B2B sales. Here is how:

• Increases efficiency of sales team – The sales team can set their priorities with the help of lead scores. By focusing on most attractive prospects that are ready to proceed with business instead of wasting time pursuing cold leads, sales team becomes more efficient.

• Increases efficiency of marketing team – Lead scoring will help marketing team quantify the most important characteristics to look for in prospective leads. It helps them roll out more targeted initiatives. In this way they can attract more potential clients and become effective.

• Fosters synergy between marketing and sales teams – Both marketing and sales teams will be able to communicate better regarding prospects with the common platform of lead scores. When they understand each other better, lead scoring parameters can be better defined improving win to lead ratios and the overall business.

• Increases revenue – Lead qualification and scoring saves time for both sales and marketing teams. When they are able to efficiently close more deals, it obviously means bigger revenues for the firm.

• Cherry picks ‘sales-ready’ leads – A lead scoring system helps the business understand the leads better and respond accordingly. Indiscriminately pushing clients towards placing an order, even when they are not ready for it, would only serve to annoy them. A lead scoring system prevents this from happening. The sales team approaches only those prospects are ready to move forward in the sales pipeline, as indicated by their high scores.

• Identifies leads that need nurturing – Some prospects may be a good fit but show limited interest. They may not be ready to engage yet. Low lead scores help identify such potential clients. In this way, the marketing team can offer a more nurturing approach for them and eventually prepare them for sales engagement.

• Helps in testing strategies – CRM softwares allow segmentation of contacts. When a change in marketing strategies within an area is to be tested, a few of the best leads in that specific area can be selected for it using a CRM system. Change in lead scores of the prospects in the engagement field can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

• Helps identify the businesses’ promoters – Appreciative customers would be good promoters for the growth of a B2B business. Lead scoring can be used to monitor customer engagement over time. Higher scores would indicate higher involvements and this can be utilized to identify potential business promoters. Automated systems can be put in place to encourage such customers to share their views which would help attract new prospects.

• Can be used in sales forecasting – After the lead scoring system has been in place enough to stabilize and enough data is available, it can be used to create predictive models. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), the purchase patterns and implicit scoring of prospects can be analyzed to determine the factors that drive a client to make a purchase. In turn, this can be used to predict when a deal can be closed with a particular lead.