Lead scoring, the best way to qualify B2B prospects
Inbound marketing is becoming essential to the success of your sales prospecting. Lead scoring is now accelerating sales: by qualifying and evaluating a prospect, you can activate the right marketing lever at the right time. Lead generation in the age of digital marketing and marketing automation saves you time and resources. Start a progressive profiling process, refine the analysis of your lead prospect, determine a score calculated on the basis of precise indicators: the best practices to remember are obvious.
Lead management, a key stage in inbound marketing
The inbound marketing strategy enables you to be in tune with your prospects: you arouse interest and first attract qualified contacts to your website through your content. Using a form on a landing page, you collect your audience's data and the personal details of your leads. This process is called lead nurturing. This is where your lead management becomes essential: lead scoring becomes crucial in assessing the right communication for your prospect's state of mind at a given moment. If you need to know more about the key concepts and vocabulary associated with inbound marketing, we have an article for you.
Lead scoring involves qualifying and evaluating your prospects
The principle of lead scoring is as follows: assign each of your prospective leads a score calculated on the basis of a certain number of criteria that you have defined in advance. These criteria will be determined on the basis of the qualified information you obtain about your prospect. But also, and above all, on the basis of your sales strategy and your sales targets. The lead scoring score therefore includes both behavioural data (what the customer does, their interactions, their expressed or formulated needs, etc.) and commercial data (what your company wants, its development strategy, etc.). This score is calculated automatically by the prospecting software you use. Lead scoring is therefore part of a marketing automation approach. More than a lead generator, it is a lead score generator (prospect score, or account score). Lead scoring is a mechanism specific to digital inbound marketing. It contrasts with outbound marketing practices, which rely on more traditional techniques, using advertising processes. To find out more, simply click on the button below.
Lead qualification, the sales trump card of lead nurturing
Lead scoring is an extremely powerful prospecting tool. Using information collected on the web, it enables you to better assess your prospect's level of maturity. For example, you'll be able to see very quickly where a particular prospect is in the conversion tunnel. In fact, depending on your lead's degree of maturity, the lead scoring score will vary.
This allows you to :
- exploit the full potential of the personal data collected,
- save time in sales prospecting by focusing on the hottest leads,
- set up marketing automation actions to help your lead progress through the conversion tunnel.
Lead scoring is a kind of breadcrumb trail, a system that supports your prospecting efforts in proactive mode (lead nurturing) for leads that are still "lukewarm" and in reactive mode for "hot" leads (conversion action). The commitment of your prospects therefore depends entirely on a well-defined lead nurturing process. The effectiveness of your sales approach depends on the entirety of your lead generation campaign.
However, this requires the use of prospecting software capable of offering detailed segmentation enabling hyper-targeting of the prospect, in order to improve and increase the conversion rate. The Sparklane for Marketing solution has been developed with this in mind. It offers several levels of targeting. In addition to traditional segmentation criteria (location, sector, size, turnover, etc.), Sparklane for Marketing offers hyper-criteria. These will include, for example, growth indicators for the prospect, their distribution channels or their presence on social networks (social media community). This first-rate data will enable you to refine your customer segmentation and, by definition, make a success of your prospecting action. This tool will enable you to manage your prospecting with a clear vision and expertise in marketing scoring.
Exploit data with marketing automation software
Relying on lead scoring for your prospecting activities can be highly beneficial. The information obtained using this method will first of all enable you to increase your knowledge of your target markets. This in-depth knowledge will then help you to contextualise the sales approach to your leads. You can adapt it to the customer's behaviour or current events. To do this, you need lead generation software that can give you the right information at the right time. This is what Sparklane for Sales offers with business signals.
Business signals are relevant current information about your prospect: product development, new management appointment, partnership, fund-raising, etc. All this data is collected on the Sparklane for Sales platform. Your sales rep can then set up a watch around those he or she considers relevant. The sales rep will be notified by email or text message when news events occur on the watch he or she has programmed.
Your sales expert's prospecting action will therefore be more relevant thanks to the 360° knowledge of the customer made possible by Sparklane for Sales. Business signals enable your sales force to react quickly and, depending on the information received, to contextualise their approach to (future) customers. In this case, lead scoring can even be predictive: the different data collected on your prospect is cross-referenced on the platform, enabling the sales person to analyse and anticipate the behaviour and needs of their prospect.
To help you qualify your prospects, we have drawn up a list of criteria:
the page (landing page) of your site on which your lead has registered determines his preferred subject,
demographic data, age, gender, location,
actions taken on your website, the path taken, the journey,
analyse behaviour on the site, time spent, repeat visits to the same content,
types of content or pages consulted, infographics, product pages, order pages, etc.
types of content downloaded: white paper, catalogue, guide, case study, etc.
the buttons clicked by your prospect, which are the best performing call-to-actions,
Request forms filled in,
the prospect's reactions to your email automation,
the interest shown in other subjects and other content,
the possibility of lead qualification adapted to your business sector,
evaluate the success of each piece of content
adapt your strategy accordingly, etc.
Let's make a brief comparison: whereas outbound marketing is aimed at the masses, as the media do, inbound marketing qualifies the lead and the digital communication to be sent to it according to its state at a given moment. This qualitative plan also includes the notion of a quantitative plan.
Using lead scoring in your prospecting activities should prove to be a highly appropriate choice. This method allows you to better qualify and evaluate your leads and to take the necessary sales actions for each of them. Lead nurturing for some, conversion actions for others. Thanks to the hyper-targeted segmentation and business signals of the Sparklane solution, you can also contextualise your prospect approach and considerably increase your chances of conversion. This marketing software is an undeniable asset for your sales prospecting.
Article translated from French