Recently, digital marketing experts use a tactic that helps them identify prospective customers. We are talking about lead scoring. It is a technique that separates leads that are more likely to convert based on several factors and determiners. Simply put, it saves time, money, and resources, and as a result, gives out leads that are worth the effort of the sales team. Regardless of the business, the benefits of quality lead scoring are huge. Here is more on that.
Increased Sales Efficiency
If your company employs a high-quality lead scoring model, then you can expect fast and very useful insights about customer readiness. In other words, you will have info about how ready a customer is to make a purchase.
Generally speaking, customers get annoyed if a salesperson tries too much. This is true for both physical and online purchases. Lead scoring will show you which customers are ready to be contacted by the sales team, and which are only in the research phase of the customer experience. Not everyone wants to be overwhelmed with information about products and services if they are simply not ready or not in the phase of buying.
Once you know how to act and when – you can rest assured that all necessary information will be delivered to the right person, meaning more success in the sales department.
Lower Operational Costs
As stated above, an efficient and professional lead scoring model will let your marketing team know which leads (potential customers) are worth the sales team’s time and resources. If a lead meets the lead scoring criteria, it is ready to be transferred to the sales team. This way, sales agents will not waste precious time, resources, and money on leads that have no or minimal interest in what your company has to offer. As an end result – costs will be lowered, and revenue will rise.
Better Collaboration Between Marketing and Sales Departments
Each company benefits enormously if its employees collaborate on a daily basis. Well, lead scoring will undoubtedly improve the collaboration between the marketing and sales teams. If these teams don’t use a leading scoring model, they may often disagree about which lead is going to convert. This will waste their time and can lead to significant company losses.
Contrary to this, by relying on a lead scoring strategy, these two teams can trust and support each other more. All this means fulfilled employees and higher productivity in the workplace.
Lead Scoring is Extremely Useful for Other Buying Stages
At first, you may get the impression that lead scoring means only the pursuit of a potential buyer. Yes, it is one of the goals – but that is not all. Suppose the digital marketing experts know what they are doing. In that case, your company can also score existing accounts, improve the content marketing approach, and help with the SEO part of the marketing strategy. Because remember, analyzing and methodically following the buyer’s journey and experience will help predict the influx of new clients and more significant revenue sums.
Improved Employee Performance Evaluation
This benefit is especially important for bigger organizations that have a large number of employees. Quite often, the sales and marketing teams are separated, and this can pose a difficulty for managers to evaluate how productive each employee and each team is.
By using a lead scoring system, owners and managers can rest assured that the sales team will receive highly-qualified leads daily from the marketing team. The marketing teams will collect all the vital info they need via social media platforms, video marketing strategies, and other marketing tactics they need.
This way, owners will have a rough number in sales that is expected monthly, making it easier to know whether the teams are productive and meet that number.
Increased Marketing Effectiveness
If done right, lead scoring will enable your company to effectively and precisely (as much as possible) measure the ROI (return of investment) of all the marketing efforts your employees are making. Since your teams will use several channels, programs, and platforms for their marketing goals – lead scoring will help them take a closer look as to which of these tactics works best, which give results but can do much better, and which (if any) are not producing any of the results you and your team were expecting.
Once you have this essential info, you can have a much clearer idea of which areas need improvement and where you should invest if you want better results in the future.
Furthermore, lead scoring can make things easier with lead nurturing as well. Once the system identifies where your prospects are in the buying cycle and journey – your team will know which type of content to send to the targeted prospects. Content that is relevant and in accordance with their interests.
Since your potential customer will only receive what they really need and want to know, you are on a good way to build trust, and once customers trust you – you instantly have clients for life.
Shorter Sales Cycle and Better Sales Forecast
As you probably already know, the sales cycle can be a long and tiring journey for the entire team. It can last long and cost a lot of money and time. Sure, it is all worth it if a purchase is made, but a high-quality lead scoring system can shorten the cycle and help with revenues too. There is not much to do in order to make the whole thing shorter, but you can start by implementing lead scoring. It will surely cut out some of the waiting around, and will allow your employees to focus on leads that really matter.
Final Thoughts
Sales forecasting is not a simple process, and it is a fact that many companies are not able to successfully handle this task. Luckily, lead scoring can be helpful in this area too. Hire experts that are experienced enough to know how to handle the whole thing properly and effectively. This way, you will avoid cash flow related issues and will optimize production levels.