Most marketers have one goal in mind – to generate leads for their business. But the truth is that not all leads convert into paying customers. So, the question is – how do you determine which leads are most likely to become real buyers? How can you optimize your marketing campaigns to generate qualified and better leads?

Implementing a Lead Scoring System - Source: Unsplash

The solution lies in lead scoring – a process that ranks the sales-readiness of your business leads using a predetermined method. You need a well-thought-out lead scoring system to understand which leads are likely to convert. Sadly, up to 79% of B2B marketers have no lead scoring system. Are you one of them?

Here’s how to implement a successful lead scoring system for your business?

Create Buyer Personas for Your Business

To build an effective lead management strategy, you must first have a clear understanding of what makes your prospects an ideal fit for your products or services. That is where buyer personas come in – the representation of your ideal customer or client. Each buyer persona profile is based on existing customer data, research, and observations.

The more buyer personas you have for your business, the more holistic your understanding of your ideal customer will be. That ensures precise and accurate lead scoring efforts. Creating buyer personas is easy when you have the right lead management tools. Focus your efforts on mobile users, social media, and other customer engagement touchpoints.

Identify the Right Data Points to Score

With a clear understanding of who your ideal buyer is, you can now identify the attributes you can assign a point value. Here, you should focus on two areas – demographic and behavioral information. Demographic information defines the lead’s characteristics, such as age, location, industry, department, job title, and company size.

Behavioral information defines the actions that a lead takes or how they interact or engage with your business. These include email subscriptions and opens, web page visits, form submissions, free trial requests, social media engagement, content downloads, and webinar registrations. Decide which criteria to score for your business.

Assign Specific Point Values

Lead scoring criteria vary from company to company. Your goal is to determine which actions and traits lead to a conversion. So, assign point values to each data point. For instance, leads who download whitepapers are more likely to convert than those who subscribe to blog updates. So, whitepaper downloaders get 25 points and blog subscribers two points.

That’s an example of how you can assign point values. To gather the data, you’ll need to develop an effective lead scoring system. Talk to your sales team to get vital insights about customer behaviors, request your customers to share their buying journey through surveys or testimonials, and integrate marketing analytics to evaluate your lead conversion process.

Determine What Point Value Makes a Lead Qualified

With each data point assigned a score, you can total all the points of a single lead and get the final score. But now, how do you determine which score value makes a lead qualified? The solution lies in testing and analysis of your lead scoring system. Start by implementing your scoring system with no minimum score, then follow up with all leads for a while.

After testing, analyze the sales follow-ups and lead score. This way, you can identify a pattern and cut-off point where most of your leads stop turning into buying customers. Once you have this number, your marketing and sales team can combine efforts to develop a lead conversion process for leads of a specific score.

Conclusion

To ensure success, invest in lead management and marketing automation tools. That will save you time, reduce data inaccuracies, and ensure the successful implementation of your lead scoring system. Organizations that use a lead scoring system record a 77% increase in lead generation ROI. Go on and implement yours and become more effective and productive.