Leads are Inbound Marketing’s very reason of existence… but as any good marketer will know, not all leads are created the same way. Some contacts have very high, short term possibilities of conversions, others will only make you waste your time.
But how to tell one from the other? Very simple: you need to have a good lead scoring strategy to generate qualified leads. So today I would like to tell you exactly what this technique is, what you need to get it functioning and how to set up your own lead qualification system.
This marketing technique consists assigning a score to each one of your leads to identify the more interesting ones for your business. Using a series of developed formulas in collaboration with marketing and sales, you can follow up on your leads’ behavior and activities, as well as their commercial profile. The objective of this analysis to track the conversion probability of a lead.
If you do it right, this technique will allow you to perfectly distinguish between the different types of leads:
Having a good lead qualification plan also lets you know for sure which of your leads is qualified enough and at what moment they will be ready for you to move their contact information to your commercial team. All of this will allow your inbound marketing strategies to achieve maximum efficiency, as you will save both time and money by focusing your efforts only on the more interesting leads.
So by now you have already been convinced to add this technique to your strategies. Before you begin, let’s go over a few key elements you will need:
Ready to start organizing your leads? If you follow these steps, it is sure to be easier than you think.
The first thing you need to do is making the distinction between the “cold” leads and qualified needs for marketing purposes. In order to do so, their contact data and activity levels are key. Here are 7 tips about identifying your MQLs:
Once you know what you are looking for in your leads, you need to order them in a list and assign a value to each one. In order to do that, it is important we be dealing with easily measurable attributes: the less space there is for improvisation and uncertainty, the better. Of course, this scale has to be approved by both the marketing and commercial department.
To make it easier, the best is to make the maximum sum of all the points 100. Some punctuations can occupy larger percentages than others, according to the importance you give them. You can even play around with negative percentages, for example, attributing a -5 to students who have downloaded your ebook for a school project.
The simplest and the easiest to automate step: when a lead reaches a certain cut-off percentage that you have established, it send its contact to the sales team for them to seal the deal.
I will never tire of saying and repeating it: in marketing, the job is never done. Even though your strategy may be working perfectly, you can not fall asleep on the job. Measure all your results, revise them continuously and optimize them constantly to perfection.