The Importance of an Established Lead Scoring Strategy

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The Importance of an Established Lead Scoring Strategy

Considering how important lead generation is in the world of B2B marketing, it is surprising that almost 80 percent of B2B marketers say they have not established a solid lead scoring strategy. Lead scoring helps a business prioritize leads according to engagement and without a strategy, leads and sales can be lost.

Lead scoring also provides real-time feedback that tells you how responsive your leads are to your marketing efforts and can indicate which leads are ready to buy. By identifying your hottest leads, you can reach out to these leads knowing that they have already expressed an interest in what you are selling.

Before you can reap the benefits of lead scoring, however, you must have a lead scoring system in place. What follows are the most basic steps involved in any lead scoring strategy:

  1. Decide what constitutes the ideal lead. What information are you looking for when it comes to leads? For example, do you want to know where they work? What they do for a living? How old they are? Their income level?
  2. Focus on your target audience. What are the common characteristics that those in your target share? This information allows you to identify who your typical customer is and what he or she needs from you.
  3. Assign values to particular characteristics. Assign a point score based on what characteristics are most important in terms of identifying your typical customer. After you have identified point values you can development an even more in-depth system that will allow you to qualify leads even further and help you to determine how qualified a lead is.
  4. Determine where a lead is in the sales funnel. Keep an eye on the buyer’s journey so you approach a lead at the correct time. Contacting a lead too early or too late can result in a lost sale.
  5. Refine, refine, refine. Lead scoring is not an exact science. It will be necessary to make changes as you perfect your lead scoring strategy. It is important to fine tune your lead scoring models so that you get the most accurate results.

Lead scoring is essential to your business’ bottom line because your sales team won’t waste valuable time and energy on leads that aren’t likely to convert. It also allows a business to focus on those leads who are most likely to convert. Finally, when done correctly, it will minimize the length of the sales cycle, improve conversion rates, and in many cases, increase the average size of the sale.

Evaluating Your Lead Nurturing Efforts

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Evaluating Your Lead Nurturing Efforts

Lead nurturing is an essential element of any successful lead generation program. However, no matter how successful your lead nurturing efforts, they could always be better.

In order to make sure that your lead nurturing efforts are the best they can be, it is important that you evaluate these efforts on a regular basis. In some cases it may make sense to bring in an outside firm to evaluate your lead nurturing program so that you are able to get a truly accurate and objective assessment.

Here are just a few of the items you can expect such a firm to assess during your lead nurturing evaluation:

Unsubscribe Rates: In the simplest terms, unsubscribe rates measure the ability of your business to keep leads interested over a period of time. If your unsubscribe rates are exceptionally high, it is usually because of poor content, inaccurate targeting or both.

Response Rates: A good measure of your content, response rates allow you to understand how many leads responded in a way that you had hoped.

Engagement: It is the job of lead nurturing to turn cold leads hot. To assess success in this area, the engagement of nurtured leads needs to be compared to leads that have not been nurtured.

Activity: Engagement can be further assessed by looking at things like meeting requests or purchase page visits.

Duration of Sales Cycle: How long does it take for a lead to become a customer? Effective lead nurturing typically results in a shorter sales cycle.

Cost/Revenue per Customer: The amount it costs to acquire a customer will decrease if your lead nurturing efforts are working correctly. Further, exceptional lead nurturing also results in more upselling. In other words, successful lead nurturing doesn’t always result in more customers but ideally it results in customers who spend more.

If you are having issues with any of the elements of these lead nurturing tactics, a quality assessment can help you fix any problems. And if you are experiencing significant challenges in the area of lead nurturing, don’t despair. Research shows that the ability to segment prospects, target content by buyer stage, and maintain interest on the part of leads are key challenges for a large number of businesses. This is especially true in the B2B industry where marketers report quality content to be a top factor in lead flow and lead nurturing efforts.

Tactical Telesolutions: 30 Years Strong

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Tactical Telesolutions: 30 Years Strong Tactical Telesolutions has been in business for over 30 years. While we feel fortunate to have been in business for so long, we have used these many years to develop into a trusted leader in our industry. At TTS, we are known for our high-end lead generation service. Take a […]

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The Modern Day Cold Call

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The Modern Day Cold Call

In today’s digital age, calling prospects may seem like an old-fashioned method of reaching out. After all, who needs to talk when you can text, email or even communicate over social media? The truth is, if you really want to connect with prospects, however, a live conversation on the phone is often the best way to go.

Talking on the phone with prospects is a great way to build a rapport that leads to stronger client relationships. It also helps to avoid the types of miscommunication that can cause deals to fall through at the last minute.

Surprisingly, research shows that in the past five years, more and more companies have put additional resources into training their sales staff on the value of talking with prospects on the phone. Why? Because unlike the cold calls of years past, today’s cold calls occur after a prospect has had some contact with a business.

So what does the modern cold-calling process look like? First, potential customers are identified and research is conducted so that sales staff know something about the issues a prospect is having or problems he or she wants solved. In other words, what type of products and services a prospect actually needs.

At this point, some would argue that reaching out to a prospect by text or email would be just as effective as a phone call but this is not the case. People crave a personal touch. Further, the back-and-forth of a live conversation can help uncover issues that ensure that a client gets exactly what he or she is looking for in a product or service. Finally, there are subtle cues that can be picked up in phone conversations that are easy to miss during electronic communications.

Not that making calls is easy. Statistics show that 80 percent of closed sales require up to five follow-up calls. Unfortunately, many salespeople give up after just one. However, if the hard work is put in, cold calls pay off. What’s more, cold calling makes lead nurturing much easier. Calling leads is a great way to remain on their radar and convey the message that their business is important to you.

In the end, today’s cold calling methods do not dismiss modern lead generation and sales techniques but instead use these methods to make cold calling more effective. For example, researching companies on line, having an active presence on social media and tracking visitors to your website can help make sure that when you cold call a prospect, you won’t get a chilly response.