Lead Scoring: What is it and what are the benefits?

Hot leads are leads who are good enough to be sent to your sales people. They are interested in your product or service and tend not to waste your company's time or resources. They are ready for a sales call!” Latus Lead Generation.

A cold lead, on the other hand, is someone who either is not interested in your product or service or has lost interest. Naturally, cold leads are much harder to talk to. Warming up these leads requires very strategic and tailored messaging to get them to take action. If there’s no interest in a product or service, your marketing team has the job of creating a demand for the product. Or using persuasive copy to convince them that they NEED that product or service. If they’ve lost interest, the marketing team will need to use sales tactics and marketing language to heat them up again. All in all – a tricky task to manage!

Because your leads are their own individuals and at their own stages of the purchase, you can’t possibly speak to them the same way. But how do you manage different messages for different leads at different stages? Lead scoring. Lead scoring allows you to target different messages to leads based on how hot or cold they are.

What is lead scoring?

Lead scoring devices hot and cold leads and then helps you manage messaging and marketing to each of them. The process of lead scoring won’t work without a team of resources to strategically manage the messaging and targeting of content.

Benefits of Lead Scoring

• Increase sales efficiency and effectiveness: help you prioritise which leads you should be spending time on.
• Increase marketing effectiveness: helps you segment lead characteristics making for more compelling advertising language.
• Tighter marketing and sales alignment: bridges a gap between marketing and sales as they can both discuss lead quality rather than just 'leads'.
• Increase in revenue: if managed correctly lead scoring should effectively increase revenue.

Where do I start?

• Start with lead quantity. How are the numbers looking? If you’re low on leads, you need to focus on attracting leads. Once you have a nice pool of leads, then you can start scoring them.
• Review your internal communication processes between marketing and sales. Make sure you have the same goals, objectives, and strategies in mind. It’s also a good opportunity to see if you’re using the same language in the market.
• Draw up your ideal buyer. It may be several different buyers. Either way, draw them up on a big board for your team to see so they are always clear on which prospects and leads they should be spending their time on.

CHALLENGE: To get on the lead scoring path, we challenge you to action these three steps in the next 14 days. Share your experiences with us on your Facebook business page and tag us in your post @throttlapp.

WATCH THIS SPACE: Our next blog will cover what to do next to activate your lead scoring, and also provide some tips on how to communicate with cold leads.

Need more leads? Throttl has customised packages that will help you attract, nurture and convert leads. View our packages now.