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How to Improve Your Lead Scoring System

Upgrade your lead scoring models with this quick guide and get a better understanding of exactly how lead scoring works.

In a perfect world, your business would be able to convert every lead it gets. Unfortunately, we do not live in a perfect world and not every lead converts.

One of the mistakes that can cost businesses a lot of time and money is wasting energy and resources on leads that will not convert. This is where a lead scoring system, or a lead scoring model, comes into play.

A great lead scoring process or a lead scoring model can help your business hone in on what types of leads convert and what types of leads do not convert well, helping you to throw resources at the leads likely to make your business money, while helping you to not invest much time or energy into leads that are not likely to convert.

Continue reading to learn more about what lead scoring is, why it is important, and what you can do to improve your lead scoring system.

What is lead scoring?

If you are not familiar with lead scoring, you may immediately ask what is a lead score?

Lead scoring is a process that helps to rank the sales readiness of each and every lead your business gets using the predetermined methodology.

Ultimately, your business starts to pick out this predetermined methodology as you start to see patterns in who is closing deals with you and what leads are not closing. As you hone in on these patterns, you can start to create this methodology and assign points to a potential lead.

These points then create a final score for the leads you have. Based on this score, your company will have a relatively good idea as to whether a lead is likely to convert or not, allowing you and your employees to sink energy into leads that can potentially help you make money.

Why is lead scoring important?

Lead scoring is important for a number of different reasons. If your business is not utilizing lead scoring, you may be wondering what exactly lead scoring can do for your business. Some of the various things that lead scoring can do include:

Lead scoring models help optimize your marketing campaigns

One of the reasons why lead scoring is so important is because it can help you optimize your marketing campaigns. Many businesses do not truly know who their target customer is until they sit down and start developing a lead scoring system.

Once they sit down and see who is spending money on them and what leads are likely to convert, businesses start to see who their target model truly is. Based on that, qualified leads marketing techniques can be used to help market to your target customer and bring in more leads.

Lead scores improve revenue

Another reason why lead scoring is so important is that it can help businesses to improve their revenue. Once a company knows what leads are more likely to convert and which are not, they are able to spend more time focusing on leads that will convert rather than wasting time on leads that are not likely to convert.

This may not sound like a huge deal, but if you have more of your employees working on leads that statistically are likely to convert, rather than wasting their energy on leads that are statistically not likely to convert, you can start to increase the company's revenue. Ultimately, this helps your business to earn more money.

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Sales and marketing alignment on lead scoring process

It is not uncommon for the sales department of a company to do one thing, and the marketing team to do another. However, when it comes to lead scoring, lead scoring forces your sales and marketing team to work hand-in-hand, and to collaborate.

Both teams are aware of who the target customer is and how to identify viable leads, and this can help with both leads marketing and leads conversions. When the sales and marketing team work together to collaborate, it also helps to target each stage of the customer journey and ensure that leads are given the same information and treated the same way by every department.

Qualified leads result in better engagement

The last reason why lead scoring is so important is that it helps to increase engagement with employees and customers. By utilizing audience segmentation techniques, your employees decide which leads to engaging with based on who is more likely to engage back.

Ultimately, being more engaged and increasing engagement helps potential customers feel good about the interaction they are getting and the attention they are getting from your company.

Lead scoring best practices

If your business is looking to implement lead scoring, you may be curious as to what best practices you should follow to help ensure that this marketing technique is a success for your business.

Below are a few lead scoring best practices that you should always utilize as you go up setting up a lead scoring model and start using a scoring system to maximize your marketing efforts and increase your sales revenue.

Connect your sales and marketing teams

Taking the time to connect your marketing and sales teams is key to maximizing a lead scoring system. If your company knows what leads are likely to convert, your marketing team knows who to market to.

This helps not only with lead generation, but it helps to ensure that the leads that are generated are more likely to convert, which increases your company's bottom line. If you have not connected your sales team and your marketing team, this is something that you must do.

Choose your attributes carefully

Another very important thing that you must do when setting up a lead scoring system is to choose the attributes that you are looking for very carefully. If you make a mistake in the attributes, your scoring model can be very off.

This obviously affects your conversion rate and how much your business can make. As such, you should always be looking at what leads convert and which don't, and be willing to change the attributes that are the cornerstone of your scoring system if something is not working well or if your targeted customer appears to be changing.

Make your database work for you

Almost every sales team has a database of leads. This database is often sorted into many categories.

When you are setting up a scoring system, you should always take the time to go through your database and make it work for you. Look at customers who converted for leads and figure out why. Look at leads that have not converted and figure out why.

You can also take your unconverted leads and run them through your scoring system and see if you have any leads your employees should take a second or third look at and attempt to sell to.

Track negative lead scores

One of the mistakes that companies make when implementing lead scoring is only tracking positive lead scores. Your company wants to track negative lead scores just as much as it wants to track positive lead scores. As much information as you can ascertain about leads and who is likely to convert and not convert helps you to ultimately hone in on and target your best possible leads. Negative lead scores can help with this process.

Keep your buyer persona in mind

Anytime you are looking to run a successful marketing and lead generation campaign, you need to keep your buyer persona in mind. This can help you with things such as behavior-based marketing and demographic-based marketing.

If you lose sight of who your target is, all of your marketing and lead generation methods could flounder or miss the mark. Keeping your buyer persona in mind at all times helps your employees know who they are targeting and trying to market to.

Get help with automation

The final best practice that you should be sure to implement with lead scoring is to get help with automation. Manually scoring your leads can be time-consuming, daunting, and leaves the door open for data to be analyzed incorrectly.

Automating your lead scoring method helps to ensure all leads are ranked appropriately and in a non-biased fashion. It ensures a computer is keeping track of data and statistics, which can help you to create an even better lead scoring system.

Grow your business with the right lead scoring system

One of the biggest challenges with using a lead scoring system or lead scoring model is that you really have to hone in on the attributes that make one lead more likely to spend money compared to another lead.

It can be challenging to determine this information on your own. This is where a lead scoring system can really help. Mailchimp can help your business to develop a great scoring system that can truly help you with lead scoring.

Additionally, Mailchimp's free automation tools help with many other tasks as well. Visit Mailchimp today to learn more about the tools they offer and how those tools can benefit your business.

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