Do you have a large volume of prospects? How are they to be prioritized? Which should you reach out to first? Lead scoring gives you the tools to answer these questions. To learn more, we interviewed Alexandre Pelletier, president of Perkuto, a Montreal company that specializes in consulting and establishing marketing strategies.
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is a practice that allows prospects to be prioritized to determine who should be targeted as a priority by the sales team. For example, if you have received ten requests for information on your website, you will be able to identify the two that you should contact first.
How is the selection made? On what criteria?
Two aspects are taken into account:
- The demographic aspect – this relates to attributes such as the company size, its geographical location, its industry. In short, everything related to the customer’s profile.
- The behavioural aspect – how does the customer behave when visiting our website? What sections does he consult? What webinars is he interested in ? What is his intention?
These tools measure the visitor’s profile and behaviour to determine what are the most interesting targets. This activity is managed by the marketing department within an automated platform.
Does lead nurturing (see our article on this subject) then take over?
Lead scoring gives a better idea of prospects that you need to target at first. It will act as a trigger to signal that the target is ready.
Can you give me a concrete example?
This practice is especially applicable in companies that have a large volume of leads. As a result, the salespeople can spend more time with interesting potential customers who match the profile sought by the company. Take, for example, a company that produces software and offers free trials. Many visitors will use the free version, but it will be necessary to determine who out of this volume are the relevant targets to be prioritized.
What results does lead scoring obtain?
To be functional, this practice must be scalable. It also requires close collaboration between the sales department and the marketing department. The latter can determine what the targets are, but sales will have to check if this is actually true, which is not always the case. Today, predictive scoring is gradually replacing lead scoring. Based on artificial intelligence, this activity lets a large volume of data be used to determine the best leads. The modelling engine takes a large amount of data into account, including past data (for example, customers with whom a sale was made in the last three years). Combined with lead scoring, we become proactive, because we are relying on real data. The subjective part that remained attached to lead scoring no longer exists.
Related article: Lead Nurturing – What Is It?