Qualification of leads is very critical to sales effectiveness and business success
. One of B2B marketing companys key challenges is to identify leads that provide the best opportunities for the sales team.
According to a recent study by Gartner, up to 70% of sales leads are not properly leveraged or are completely ignored, thus wasting marketing program dollars."
The sales enablement process helps sales teams to deliver value to prospects at the right time. However, there is one important aspect to identifying leads that can help sales teams to qualify prospects and focus efforts in the right direction lead scoring. Lead scoring helps to rank prospects based on many factors.
Uses of Lead Scoring
Lead scoring helps to align sales follow-up to the right person, thereby accelerating the buying process.
The process of scoring even helps bridge the sales marketing disconnect. This is possible because both teams can work effectively based on feedback from each other regarding the prospective customer.
The best thing about lead scoring is it helps to prioritize sales follow based on the sales readiness of the prospect.
With robust marketing automation applications, leads can now be automatically scored and prioritized based on their website activity, interest and intent. Based on lead scoring, marketing teams can differentiate between leads that are sales ready and those that are not. Accordingly they can pass on the sales ready leads to sales and focus their efforts on lead nurturing for the others.
Marketing automation software can provide the following benefits to lead scoring process.
It allows sales and marketing teams to define the parameters for a 'good' lead in advance, based on which it then classifies all leads.
It monitors every click and keystroke, to understand where the visitors are in their buying cycle and which of them are exhibiting key buying indicators.
The scoring rules use the right combination of implicit and explicit information about a website visitor to determine their identity and quality.
The website activity data that is accumulated over a period of time and when combined with a company level view can become a powerful tool in qualifying leads.
Automated lead scoring process makes sales more efficient by helping them focus on the hottest leads first and get to them with a relevant solution in real time.