Not all leads are created equal, as every marketer has found out to their cost at some point in their career. We have a tendency to confuse conversions with lead generation, but just because someone has downloaded an ebook and provided you with their email address, it doesn’t make them a potential customer. Not yet, at least.
That’s why people use lead nurturing programmes and other initiatives to take those cold prospects and to turn them into red hot leads that are ready to hand over to their sales teams. But how can you tell whether somebody’s ready? And how can you differentiate between different prospects? After all, it’s not a binary thing, and people’s willingness to buy comes on a sliding scale.
One of the most popular solutions is to use lead scoring, which effectively tracks prospects throughout each of their touchpoints and awards them an overall score. Here’s how that works.
Lead Scoring
Let’s go back to that customer who entered their email address in exchange for a free download. We’ll give them five points for doing that, and then we’ll give them two more when they click a link in a follow-up email and read a blog post. Perhaps then they go quiet for a month and so we remove a point for that, but then they visit the pricing page (three more points) and the free trial page (five more points).
That leaves them on a grand total of fourteen points, which we’ll assume meets our hypothetical threshold. We’ve decided in advance that as soon as someone reaches twelve points or above, their information is passed on to the sales team and someone gives them a call to follow up with them. And instead of trying to just push a quick sale, your reps can instead say, “I saw you downloaded our ebook a while back and that you’re interested in our free trials. Would you like me to go ahead and get you started?”
As you can imagine, this second, more personalised approach tends to be much more effective because it shows your prospects that you’re listening to them. On top of that, if you’re able to add a little value by solving their problems instead of just trying to sell them something, you won’t even need to try to sell to them. If your product is good enough, it’ll sell itself.
Conclusion
Lead scoring is just one element of a successful lead generation and lead nurturing campaign, but used correctly it can have a dramatic effect on customer acquisition rates and return on investment. For best results, it can be combined with a customer relationship management (CRM) system and marketing automation techniques to create a winning lead gen approach for B2B companies of any shape, size and industry.
Need a little help with lead generation? Help is at hand. Request a demo of Bant.io to find out how we can help your company to grow by sending hot B2B leads directly to your inbox. You won’t regret it.
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.