Effective marketing has always been equated with making timely, relevant connections with target audiences. To be effective in today’s market, you need to put your time and effort where your customers are—that’s how lead scoring models came into play.
Lead generation is crucial to the success of any organization, but the more leads your company receives, the pickier you’ll need to be about which ones to pursue.
Lead scoring is not a cookie-cutter approach. Each business has a one-of-a-kind scoring system to evaluate performance against its own goals. Nevertheless, predictive lead scoring helps companies have some precedents to follow when developing a marketing plan and determining how to assign a score to a lead.
However, there is no need to start from scratch. In this article, we provide an overview of many lead scoring models you can use to improve your lead-nurturing tactics. Let’s check it out!
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is a method for identifying potential customers and filtering out those not a good fit for a company’s offerings. It aids sales teams in zeroing in on the most promising prospects, sealing the transactions they’re working on, and gaining insight into the types of leads they’re attracting and how to attract more.
How does lead scoring work?
To score a lead, you assign precise figures to several data sources using your collected information. You can give a lead score depending on factors such as the quality of the information they provided you and how they interacted with your website and brand elsewhere online.
For example, a lead’s source or status can indicate how likely it is to convert into a qualified lead. Once you have these values, you can plug them into a formula to get a score that reflects your lead’s quality.
By adhering to this method, sales and marketing teams are better able to prioritize leads, provide timely responses, and ultimately convert a higher percentage of those leads into paying customers.
7 Best lead scoring models
Lead scoring models guarantee that the scores you give each lead align with how well they’re likely to convert into paying customers. Many lead scores use a scale from 0 to 100, but each lead scoring model you develop will emphasize a different quality of your ideal client.
Suppose you’re exclusively pitching to particular customers, such as stakeholders or homeowners. In that case, you can optimize your landing page forms to include demographic inquiries to understand better how leads align with your ideal customer profile.
This lead scoring model eliminates anomalies from the sales pipeline by eliminating leads that do not fit the demographics of the products or services you offer. If you only do business in a specific area, you can weed out leads that don’t come from your target city, state, zip code, or nation.
2. Business information
If your company is business-to-business (B2B), do you like to sell to a specific size, kind, or sector of business? Do you prefer businesses that cater to other companies or consumers?
You can collect this information by including such questions in your landing page forms, allowing you to provide bonus points to leads that match your ideal customer profile and filter out those who don’t.
3. Authority level
Now that you have a good idea of the size, nature, location, and perhaps even income of the businesses you are selling, the million-dollar question is, “Who’s the decision maker at your target companies?” The answer depends on your offering and your intended clientele.
Your company’s budget and the position’s strategic relevance will determine how much weight you give to a person’s job title and degree of seniority. To find the right decision-maker at your target company, you should first figure out if your offering is:
High-investment, high-strategic priority, such as heavy equipment
High-investment, low-strategic priority services like utilities
Low-investment, high-strategic priority like security compliance certification
Low-investment, low-strategic priority items such as company stationery
Evaluating the influencers in your sales cycle is much easier after you have a firm grasp on the market segmentation that best describes your product or service.
4. Online habits and behavior
You can gauge the level of interest a lead has in purchasing from you by how they interact with your website. You need to look at the leads that turned into customers—which coupons did they download? How many freebies did they snag? Which specific pages did they see before purchasing from you?
There should be a balance between the quantity and quality of forms and pages. For instance, you might assign prospects who visited your site several times a higher score than those who visited only once or twice. Similarly, you can give a higher lead score to visitors to contact or pricing pages and visitors who fill out demo or quotation request forms.
But what do you do if a lead’s behavior changes over time? Indicators of waning interest include a lead’s abandonment of your website and any related downloads. After a specific amount of time has passed without the lead engaging with your website, you can deduct points from their initial score.
5. Social media interaction
One of the best lead scoring models is to measure a lead’s interest by looking at their level of social media interaction with your company. You can look at how many times they retweeted, commented on, or shared your posts on all platforms. If your ideal customers are active on social media, you may provide bonus points to leads with a particular number of followers.
6. Email engagement
You can’t tell how serious a customer they are about purchasing from you just because they signed up for your email list. But you can tell how interested they are by looking at how many emails they open and how many links they click.
For example, your sales team can track which leads consistently engage with your marketing emails by opening each one. In this approach, they may put their efforts where the students appear most interested. So, they can give leads with high-value communications, like demo offers, a higher lead score.
7. Spam filtering
One of the best lead-scoring models is filtering out prospects who filled out landing page forms in ways that raise red flags for spam. You can check for “leads” that didn’t capitalize the initial letter of a name, a surname, or a corporate name.
You can also look for evidence that the lead typed in a term requiring four or more letters from the standard “QWERTY” keyboard layout.
In addition, you can compare the email formats of your leads to those of your existing customers. For instance, if you’re targeting corporations, you can weed out prospects with free email services instead of company domain addresses.
Elevate your lead scoring models with Nutshell
The success of your sales team relies heavily on lead scoring, yet it can only be effective if you keep track of your leads. That’s why you need customer relationship management (CRM) software like Nutshell to track your prospects and their journey.
Using Nutshell, you can categorize your leads by value, stage in the sales funnel, and other relevant criteria. Because of this, sending prospects to the appropriate sales representatives at the right times is much less of a hassle.We’re not expecting you to use our CRM before you at least test its essential features. That’s why we offer a 14-day free trial of Nutshell with absolutely no obligation. Try it today!
