When it comes to your organization’s unique sales process, timing can be critical when evaluating leads and when to get your sales team engaged. Approaching a prospect too early may scare them off, while approaching a prospect too late risks that they’ve moved on to researching other solution providers.

Lead scoring can help you identify and understand key factors around prospects engaging with your brand, including ideal buyer personas and when outreach from your sales team would be the most timely.

What is lead scoring? According to HubSpot, lead scoring is the process of assigning values — often in the form of numerical “points” — to each lead you generate for the business. You can score your leads based on multiple attributes, including the professional information they’ve submitted or how they’ve engaged with your website and brand across the internet. This process helps sales and marketing teams prioritize leads, respond to them appropriately, and increase the rate at which those leads become customers.

Here are a few beneficial reasons why you should implement a lead scoring program.

1. Get your automation platform to do the work for you

Automation platforms like Marketo, Eloqua, and HubSpot have a vast array of features that continually collect data and valuable information uniquely aligned to your business. Lead scoring is the process of assigning points to prospects interacting with your brand. Actions like opening emails or clicking links, visiting key webpages, and downloading your content attributes positive points (people likely researching your solutions to do business).

By implementing a lead scoring program, you and your team will be able to see which leads are sales ready in real-time. Not only does this increase the quality of leads for sales but the majority of lead scoring is done behind the scenes with automation — not burdening your marketing team.

2. Get the most out of your inbound marketing assets

Perhaps you’ve implemented strategic marketing assets like a beautiful new website with engaging information, downloadable content, streaming video, and interactive engagements. Digital marketing budgets can soar quickly, so how do you show ROI for these new features?

Lead scoring can track page views, content downloads, landing pages, and form fills, just to name a few, by awarding points to prospects who best fit your ideal buyer role as well as capture analytical data on what content attracts premium leads. This allows you to focus on repeating and improving your most effective campaigns and assets.

3. Further align your sales and marketing teams

Sales and marketing go together like peanut butter and jelly. And other times, like oil and water. Alignment can oftentimes frustrate both sides due to demanding KPIs, bandwidth constraints, or unwillingness to update outdated processes. But lead scoring can help.

Lead scoring is a key component for improving the marriage between sales and marketing by improving sales efficiency when marketing hands over the right lead at the right time, connecting the success of the lead cycle to specific campaigns that can be repeated, tracking total number of leads passed over to sales, and, ultimately, increasing revenue leading to accelerated trust and collaboration

Not sure how to best implement a lead scoring program in your marketing? We can help!