Can Lead Scoring Make Your Marketing Efforts More Effective?

If you’re lucky, you have enough leads to keep track of that you’re almost overwhelmed. Prioritizing and keeping up with them is a challenge, but it’s better than the alternative of not having enough leads to grow your business.

 
The question is how to meet that challenge to take advantage of the enviable position you’re in. Lead scoring is a tool that can help you manage leads to make sure you convert as many as possible into paying customers.

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is the process of assigning a value to each of your leads. That value indicates how ready they are to make a purchase. It usually takes the form of points that you assign to each lead based on what you know about them based on things like demographics, and their actions such as opening emails you send, downloading case studies, filling in forms, and more.

You can use those point values to determine the likelihood of the lead becoming a customer to identify your ideal prospects and focus your efforts on converting them.

Lead scoring is important because as recent research shows, at least 50% of your prospects aren’t going to fit into the category of an ideal prospect. They may buy from you at some point, but the likelihood is that they won’t. Are you willing to waste the time of your marketing and sales staffs chasing after leads that you’ll never convert to customers?

Most marketing and sales leaders don’t want to be in that position. They know that wasting time means unmet goals and fewer conversions. Fewer conversions mean less revenue and less opportunity to grow the business.

What Can Lead Scoring Do for You?

Lead scoring can have a positive impact in a number of ways, but it starts with helping to align the activities of your marketing and sales departments. Traditionally, your marketing department has been tasked with generating leads and your sales department has been tasked with turning those leads into customers.

But have you ever heard a salesperson complain that they don’t get good leads from the marketing department? This is one area where lead scoring can have a big impact. When marketing and sales agree on the method used to assign scores to leads, the hand off to sales is much more effective.

Salespeople are notified when a lead has a “sales-ready” score, and they know that they have a good chance of converting that lead. It provides much more motivation to the sales staff because they don’t get frustrated working with leads that don’t turn into customers, regardless of how hard they try.

There are other advantages to using lead scoring. For example, the salespeople already have detailed information about the lead and can pick up where the lead is in terms of the customer journey. Sales will know how the lead has interacted with your company up to that point, including whether they have downloaded a report or opened emails on specific topics. This makes reaching out to the lead much more effective and it helps cement the relationship between the lead and the salesperson.

In addition, the salesperson knows where the lead is in the customer journey. Some leads may still be in the research phase, and the salesperson can provide information to assist. Other leads may be ready to make a decision and the salesperson can offer things like live demos or free trials.

The marketing department also benefits because they can work to create more effective marketing campaigns. The marketing staff can identify the types of campaigns and channels that produce the most sales-ready leads and focus their efforts accordingly.

How to Make Lead Scoring Work for You

Lead scoring can have long-range benefits that will result in more conversions, more sales, and increased revenue. At the same time, lead scoring saves time and increases productivity in your sales and marketing departments.

However, implementing a lead scoring system manually is a virtually impossible task. You’ll need to use marketing automation technology to take advantage of the potential lead scoring presents. A marketing automation system can automate the tasks of tracking lead activity, keeping scores, and routing leads to sales when the right threshold is reached.

This technology also provides a wide range of other benefits such as analyzing the results of marketing efforts so that your marketing staff can fine tune their efforts. Leading edge technology also incorporates AI in things like email creation to streamline the workflow in both marketing and sales departments.

How Datavail Can Help

Datavail has created a whitepaper, “Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing: Improve Productivity, Customer Relationships, and Revenue.” You can download the whitepaper to learn about a premier marketing automation system that is one of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 business modules.

For companies who already use a range of Microsoft Dynamics 365 modules, the Marketing module is even more powerful. Not only can you use all the marketing automation tools available, but you can integrate it with other Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications such as Power BI and Customer Insights.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Datavail is in a unique position to help you plan for, implement, and manage the Marketing module to get the most from your investment. Our experts can ensure that the solution is customized for your company, and that your implementation and integrations are a success without straining your IT department. Feel free to contact us for more information.