Understanding Lead Nurturing and Scoring

by AMarket Force Leader in B2B Marketing and Demand Generation Serv

Lead Nurturing is the process that includes creating and maintaining a relationship with the leads that are interested in possibly converting into customers, but are not indeed inclined to purchase now. The intention is to develop a rapport and build credence and reliability by helping users throughout the buying cycle. The process would involve educating the prospect, increasing their awareness about your business and its services/products and build trust. This helps in ensuring a higher probability of gaining their business when they are ultimately ready to make a purchase.

Lead Scoring is an essential part of Lead Nurturing. It is the method of assigning a numerical score to leads based on their interactions with your business, their behavior, buyer persona based on customer demographics, behavioral pattern, level of engagement as well as other criteria. Each sort of interaction by a user has a specific point value determined by the seller, and these values are automatically accumulated as leads progress through their buying process. Apart from their actions, the leads are also assigned points based on their attributes such as who they are, their location, the industry they work in, etc. When the lead score reaches a pre-determined level, the lead is then passed to the sales department along with the details of the particular leads interactions and engagements till date. This gives the sales team all the vital information that they require to start a fruitful exchange with the connections that have shown that they are ready to make a purchase.

As mentioned before, lead scoring is a very important part of lead nurturing and both the process goes hand in hand. Lead scoring services help in increasing the efficiency of the marketing process. These processes are usually implemented with the use of various automation systems for marketing.

Here are the key benefits of using lead nurturing and scoring:

Helps in prioritizing the most relevant leads for follow-up by the sales team. It enables you to make sure that the sales team only invests time and energy in genuinely legitimate prospects, by just sending them hot leads that are ready to make a purchase. Meanwhile, the marketing team can keep working on the warm leads and nurture them until they are prepared to make a buying decision.

It aids in building collaboration between the marketing and sales team. The two need to work in synchronization to define the profile of sales-ready leads. Understanding what type of prospects convert is critical. From there, marketing can create targeted programs for these prospects, and hand off sales-ready leads to sales to close the deal.

It helps in increasing your return on investment (ROI) in both marketing and sales aspect. It enables you to identify the effectiveness of your marketing strategy and aids you in making decisions on improving the efforts. With the sales team focusing on only the most probable leads, less time and resources are spent on leads that are not yet ready to make a decision.

Lead nurturing, and scoring is straightforward to implement into your business. Once you have charted the goals for your sales and marketing teams, a suitable platform can help you achieve these strategies very quickly.