how lead scoring can help bridge the gap between sales

How Lead Scoring Can Help Bridge the Gap Between Sales & Marketing

whitepaper

GatorLeadsHow Lead Scoring can help bridge the gap between Sales & Marketing

Lead Scoring: Where To Start...What qualifies a lead? It’s the age old debate between sales and marketing that businesses have been looking for a solution to for quite some time. That solution is lead scoring software. Based on sales logic and a mathematical equation, advanced scoring techniques have allowed sales and marketing processes to merge. Now businesses have a smoother pipeline, in theory.

Of course, the technology does not work effectively without best practices. There are a number of lead scoring models businesses can implement. This whitepaper will analyse which scoring techniques are the most effective, if and how the software can develop any further and how sales and marketing teams can successfully qualify their leads with this technology. Along with a number of useful hints, tips and statistics, this whitepaper holds everything you need to know about where to start with lead scoring technology.

Contents

The origin of lead scoring. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 What lead scoring software does . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

How lead scoring works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Creating a lead scoring system within your business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Lead scoring rules to establish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Building the right user journey for both sales and marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Improving your pipeline efficiency with lead scoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Improving sales efficiency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Improving marketing efficiency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Lead scoring outcomes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Moving forward with lead scoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9


The reality is that any pipeline or drain has clogs, leaks and rust. Sales complain that the pipeline is clogged with poor-quality leads from the start. Marketing, in turn, moan that sales are letting hard-earned leads slip through the pipeline like a leak. This leads to two differing opinions and no real solution, causing the pipeline to become rusty with not enough free-flowing prospects. This reality meant that business profit margins were suffering.

Now companies had a way to recognise who their leads were and qualify them successfully before they moved any further through the pipeline. Lead scoring was the multi-purpose drain cleaner that could help sales & marketing work together to clear the pipes and restart the process with the right leads

Then came lead generation technology, and with it lead scoring software.

The Origin Of Lead ScoringAs the introduction of this whitepaper touched on, lead scoring was invented as a methodology to qualify leads. It wasn’t that long ago that sales and marketing were fighting over what made a “good” prospect. In fact, some companies still are with only 32% of companies effectively using lead scoring.

We all know the ideal sales pipeline. Marketing attract strangers, sales convert visitors and close leads, account managers delight customers and choose brand ambassadors to help marketing out. And so the cycle goes. It’s certainly the dream, but – if we’re honest – it is slightly removed from reality.

strangers visitors leads customers promoters

ATTRACT

CONVERT

CLOSE DELIGHT


What lead scoring software doesLead scoring is a methodology that works alongside lead generation & visitor tracking tools to identify leads, recognise their behaviour and rank them according to their perceived value to the company. The resulting score will tell the sales and marketing teams what next steps should be taken to engage with the prospect (or lead) in question.

For example:

Advanced lead scoring software will allow you to filter your leads by many different levels, so you can take more than one approach to engaging prospects beyond their initial interaction on your website. This allows you to time manage your leads successfully, sending your higher ranking leads directly through the pipeline.

HOT WARM COLD

If they are asales-readyHOT LEADarrange ameeting or a demo

If they are aWARM LEADemail themwith more information

If they are aCOLD LEADplace them in a lead-nurturing campaign


The most accurate lead scoring models rely on both internal and external information.

How lead scoring works

Internal information includes:

Where they have visited on your website

How many times or how long they’ve interacted with a certain page on your website

If they’ve engaged with any of your emails

If they’ve downloaded any of your PDFs, whitepapers or resources

External information includes:

The size of the company they work for

A company description– including mission, values and business goals

Their job titles (to establish if they are the key decision maker)

Their financial data

Their geographical location

The above can, in fact, be tracked with visitor tracking software. Combining this with lead scoring software allows you to automatically qualify leads, rather than manually keep an eye on them.

This company identification information can be revealed with IP lookup technology. Again, combining it with your lead score software will allow your teams to qualify the target audience for your business.

In the future, lead scoring may develop to include a “social score”. This will predict a lead’s value to your business based on their presence and activity on social networks.


With these statistics, we’ve found the most successful lead scoring and page scoring template is much like an onion. With your homepage being the outer layer that everyone handles, working down into the info, product and key sales page as they become more interested.

See below as an example for what page scoring you could implement to make sure you are qualifying the right leads. Your page scoring should be updated every 3 months, to keep up with any website changes or shift in the target audience you are looking to attract.

As for the lead scoring software itself, there are currently two different methods that rank leads. One involves simply tracking the amount of time a prospect spends on your website, the other involves ranking the pages they are looking at.

The former unfortunately is not accurate because there are a number of distractions that could affect the amount of time a lead spends on your website. For example, they could take a call while on your web page for 10 minutes or minimise your website as a tab and appear to be on a certain page all day.

The latter is much more effective, as long as you page score correctly. After years in the industry, we have found that certain pages offer a higher conversion rate than others.

A blog pageconverts 69% more customers than a website with no blog page

A key feature pageconverts up to 500% more customers than a homepage

Whitepaper downloads, demos and free trial pagesperform 500% better than a contact us page

Homepage = 1 point

Info Page = 2 point

Product Page = 10 point

Key Sales Page = 22 point

0-10 Interested

10-25 Cold Lead

25-50 Warm Lead

50+ HOT HOT HOT


This lead score can be based on individual visits, company visits (if multiple key decision makers have been on your website), one visit or a

score based on a collection of their visits over time.

With page scoring and visitor tracking, you will then see each of your website leads build up a score. Using a lead template scoreboard will tell you how and when to interact with a lead based on their score.

For example:

0 – 10 points:An interested lead that needs a bit more information

10 – 25 points: A cold lead who needs to be placed in a lead nurturing campaign

25 – 50 points: A warm lead who should be sent an introductory sales email

50+ points: A hot lead who is ready to be called by sales to arrange ameeting or demo


Creating a Lead Scoring SystemWithin Your Business

At this stage, it is important to note that lead scoring can only create qualified leads if you have an idea of the target audience you want to attract and pursue. While every business is different, there are a number of static elements this section will cover that can help you decide on your own point scoring system. This is the hardest part of the lead scoring process, particularly if you have no website data to work off.

The first step when considering lead scoring within your lead generation software is to sit your sales and marketing team down together to decide on what qualifies a lead.


This information will develop the basis of your target “persona” and their buyer journey. These personas will be used in marketing to attract the right audience and promote the right aspects of your business to strangers from the start. It’s important for marketing to rememberthat only 50% of your website leads are likely to be qualified. For sales, it’s important to realisethat of the 50% of interested leads, 96% won’t be ready to buy the first time

Together, they will need to establish:

Whichcompanies, in

which industriesare “hot” for

your product?

Where hot leads are coming from

(which campaigns marketing should

focus on)?

Which products are a successful turning point inthe sales pitch?

What level of the company hierarchy you need to target

e.g. marketing manager/sales

director?

1 2 3 4

“Lead scoring is only a solution when combined with common

sense and a bit of patience from both sides of an organisation.”

Lee Chadwick, MD WOW Analytics

Lead scoring rules to establishWhile the first meeting should establish the persona and buyer journey, there are a number of other rules you will need in place to make sure your lead scoring is effective. Because lead scoring works with company identification and visitor tracking, you must identify the following rules for each of the tools.

For company identification, youwill need to decide:

The smallest and the largest sizes of the companies you want to target

Whether your product is more suited tosales or marketing, so you know who to

promote to & if the key decision maker willbe interested

The industries you can contribute to or work alongside

Whether your product has any geographical set backs

For visitor tracking, you will need to decide:

Which marketing mediums drive the right traffic for the lead scoring external information

Which of your pages convert the most leads (to help with your page scoring)

What your unique selling points are in your product journey (increase the ease of your

user journey)

Which pages need to have more prominent CTA’s on their page to push prospects

through the pipeline


Once sales and marketing have both decided on the above rules, you will need to set your scoreboard rules. Consider how many points a lead would need until they become hot. In the previous section, we gave you the current best practice scoreboard, promoting leads who built up a score of more than 50+ as “hot”.

However, not all businesses are the same and each lead band should reflect the complexity of your product and the length of your sales cycle. The longer your sales cycle, the higher your point system is likely to be. More complicated businesses with a multitude of products may also need to have more or higher lead bands than most. For the majority of B2B businesses with an average sales cycle of 6 months and a basic set of products, you should find the original lead band module of 50+ points equaling a hot lead will qualify your leads successfully.

Building the right user journey for both sales and marketing

For sales, their focus will be making sure there is enough information for leads to gain access to in order to make an informed decision. There needs to be a number of resources, including blogs, whitepapers and case studies all accessible in one section.

73% of businesses reported that the simpler their website user journey, the stronger their lead results were.

Your website user journey is one of the most important elements of setting up your lead scoring.

For marketing, the focus should be on which campaigns successfully drive the target audience towards your website in the first place, and investing as much of their budget there as possible. The call to actions marketing use in their emails, social posts and blogs should be transparent enough to not con leads into coming to the website “just because”. They will also need to be enticing enough to drive enough traffic so that sales are being given quality and quantity leads to process with a lead score.

With 86% of users deciding on a product before allowing contact with a sales person – whether via email or over the phone – this content is crucial to help leads build up enough of a score to move on to sales trying to convert and close them.


With lead scoring in place, marketing are able to identify which marketing channels are effectively drawing in the correct crowd. It could be a PPC, email or social media campaign. By being able to track these campaigns and see which ones are attracting leads that are quickly qualifying into sales opportunities, marketing can invest their budget into these areas. This ensures the pipeline is filled with enough high-quality leads from the start.

Attracting strangers

Improving Your Pipeline Efficiency With Lead ScoringLet’s consider the original pipeline we looked at in part one. Each individual element is important in its own right. Lead scoring does not just affect who marketing attract and how many visitors’ sales can convert to leads and further prospects. Implemented properly, lead scoring can improve your overall lead management approach and shorten your sales cycle.

strangers visitors leads customers promoters

ATTRACT

CONVERT

CLOSE DELIGHT

With visitor tracking technology within lead scoring, sales are able to see exactly which web pages have caught their prospect’s attention. They can then focus on the information in these pages to tailor their sales pitch when they finally make contact. For example, if a lead has looked at a pricing page 3 times and scored a value of 44, the price is obviously an aspect that concerns the lead. By finding this pain point early, your sales team can offer a solution that is more likely to convince the lead to close the deal.

Converting visitors

The crucial part of the pipeline that generates ROI, it is important your sales people are not wasting time on leads who want to trial your product but never close. Instead, lead scoring can help you establish how interested they are in your product. If they constantly interact with your website and product, read blogs and respond to emails – they are more likely to close. This method effectively gives sales a quick way to weed out the time wasters and focus on the leads that will generate ROI for the business.

Closing leads


By dealing with sales-ready leads immediately and not bothering prospects before they are ready, your business builds itself up as a customer-loved brand. Service is the start of a great customer relationship and first impressions are important. With the knowledge that lead scoring provides, you can make sure you are impressing customers from the start. It also allows marketing to focus on promoting the features that are converting customers. These key selling points will set your company apart from your competitors and give your marketing another edge. It also allows them to focus on which products may need to be moved to later in the customer lifespan as upsell opportunities sales can take advantage of later down the line.

Delighting customers

Your brand ambassadors are the customers who not only moved successfully through the sales pipeline but also enjoyed the experience. Using their pipeline process as an example will allow marketing to get an even better idea of the target audience they should be approaching, rather than just working off fictitious business personas. Word of mouth is still the most powerful marketing tool any business can take advantage of. The leads these brand ambassadors bring to the first step of the pipeline will qualify as a sales-ready lead faster than those coming through other campaigns.

Promoting brand ambassadors

Improving sales efficiencyAllowing sales to focus on the hot inbound leads means that more time can be spent making sure each one of these leads are successfully qualified. Currently, 75% of qualified leads aren’t followed up. With 1 in 4 of those leads qualified enough to be deemed “sales-ready”, lead scoring can improve efficiency and affect your overall ROI by at least 25%. By also putting marketing in charge of lead nurturing, you free up your outbound sales techniques to be dedicated to this portion of leads.

80% of top performing companies are more likely to use lead scoring technology- Aberdeen Research

Improving marketing efficiencyRecognising the buying behaviour of a normal retail purchase is simple. A customer picks up an item, looks at the price tag, possibly tries it on and then either buys it or doesn’t. Recognising this behaviour online can be tricky, hence why marketing has struggled in the past to identify the “right” leads for sales. With lead scoring, though, there is a mathematical equation that shows marketing this digital body language to the same effect. As they move through the buyer journey, marketing can qualify leads based on their scores in a quick, efficient manner, without worrying about clogging up the pipeline with leads that won’t convert.


Lead Scoring OutcomesLead scoring outcomes are three-fold. A successful system should:

Help your sales team to avoid contacting leads before they are ready to buy, saving them from “scaring off” leads too early. By focusing sales attention on the

sales-ready leads that are the most valuable, lead scoring improves sales efficiency as well as their

effectiveness.

Identify which leads could be converted within a lead nurturing campaign. By helping marketing

establish lead characteristics based on scores, they can effectively

target leads with the right information that improves their score over time and eventually converts them into customers.

Tighten the alignment between sales and marketing. With one

combined approach, lead scoring strengthens the relationship

and allows both teams to take equal responsibility for lead managements & producing

pipeline ROI.

1 2 3

Moving forward with lead scoringLead scoring is still relatively new, but it has already seen the rise of “smarketing”. The integration of sales and marketing processes have seen some marketing teams take on the lead nurturing side completely for their sales team. As inbound sales and marketing continue to move from strength to strength, marketing will drive their successful lead results with lead scoring. They will also replace more of the outbound methods with multiple lead nurturing email campaigns, especially as lead nurturing has shown in the past 2 years to convert 50% more leads at 33% less cost than outbound sales.

Once your own pipeline has lead scoring in place, you can implement a number of other lead generation tools to enhance your pipeline to become bigger and handle more, allowing your business to grow.

These tools include:

Lead nurturing has shown in the past 2 years to convert 50% more leads at 33% less cost than outbound sales.

Once a lead has come onto your website, use an IP lookup company to establish which of their employees are on a private database. This allows you to see who key decision makers in the company lead are and how to get in contact with them.

The ability to purchase individual data

Once you have an email address, you can send a personalised URL in an email to track an individual’s behaviour. This allows you to build up an individual lead score and pitch to just one key decision maker.

PURLs

Tracking which marketing campaigns are successful is tricky, particularly where PPC is concerned. But with a UTM URL builder, you can track your PPC campaigns to see which keywords your hot leads are using to find you. This allows your marketing team to focus their spend in a way they haven’t before.

PPC Tracking

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