The Short Life of Online Sales Leads
Sales and Marketing are the most vital departments for your business to grow, thrive, and create a brand in the market. While C-suit is the face of the company for shareholders and strategic affairs, it’s the sales and marketing teams that are represent your company.
Traditionally, sales teams have been operating on certain predefined models or on gut feelings, leading to improperly categorizing, ranking, and then excluding the leads that may be good for their business.
According to the research report provided by HBR, 26.1% leads get contacted within 5 minutes of lead creation and overall average response time for all the leads is 42 hours. So, not to mention that the vendor who contacts the lead within the first hour of query has 7 times better chances to qualify them than those who contact afterwards.
Source: hbr.org
In today’s fast moving world, where businesses need to evolve at the pace of time itself, how viable is it to work, in a traditional way, for your staff to profile the prospective customers on their gut feeling and at their own pace?
Need of the hour, in this case, is turning to automation in ranking the leads received through the visits on your website - something we know as “Lead scoring”!
So What is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring is a mechanism of assigning scores to leads to prioritise the work for the sales team. This scoring happens based on the demographic and behavioral criteria which are predefined in the system by all the stakeholders (sales, marketing, and management) according to the business profiling criteria. For example, a subscriber receives a behavioral score for visiting your website, filling out the ‘contact us’ form, surfing deeper on your website or downloading an eBook and demographic score, based on the job title, location, company size, and revenue, etc.
In a recent study conducted by Oracle, organisations using lead scoring systems improved close rates by 30%, increased company revenue by 18%, and increased revenue per deal by 17%.
Let’s look at how Lead Scoring helps your business:
1. Efficiency
The biggest benefit of lead scoring is bringing in efficiency by eliminating a lot of manual work. It helps your sales team to spend more time with the prospects that have high conversion chances.
2. Workflow
With lead scoring, it becomes easy to define and know which internal team should perform what next steps and who has picked up which lead. No more conflicts or confusions.
3. Common Language
Lead scoring integrates into the larger sales and marketing tools used by your organisation, leading to the usage of same language by both, sales and marketing teams and eliminating inefficiency caused by inconsistency.
4. Objectivity
Lead scoring brings in the objective means to sort through website visitors to rank them on the basis of how likely they are to convert to customers.
5. Segmentation
With lead scoring, it’s easy to segment the visitor’s basis factors that are important to your business. For, example, you can segment visitors on the basis of individual or organisation, demographics, age, gender, etc. This will give you a better picture of your ideal buyer profiles.
6. Speed
Now that leads have a score assigned to them, manual work of analysing the lead and reaching a conclusion from the same won’t be a task for your sales team. Lead scoring helps speed up the response to the prospective customers’ needs.
7. Better Nurturing
With appropriate profiling, it becomes easier for the sales staff to nurture the lead and apply the appropriate next steps.
8. Integration
Lead scoring can easily be integrated with your enterprise system, leading to better integration of sales and marketing teams with the rest of the organisation.
9. Insight into Preferences
Lead scoring allows more insight into your customers’ preferences and behaviours on buying. For example, your sales team may notice that high number of closed deals are going for a certain service or product. You can then look at offering the same for a higher engagement.
10. Futuristic
With lead scoring, it will be easier for you to see the trend where you have higher conversions and higher closures. This will help you decide the next steps and allocate resources accordingly, be it time, manpower or finance.
To reap the benefits of Lead Scoring, all you need is an expert to set it up for you, some patience, and a little fine tuning every time there is a change in business or external factors. The result would be the perfect alignment of marketing and sales teams, increased revenues, and measurable ROI for your marketing team.
Get in touch with us to know how you can make the most of lead scoring for your business.
