Lead scoring, the best way to qualify B2B prospects
Inbound marketing is becoming an essential part of successful sales prospecting. Lead scoring now accelerates sales: qualifying and evaluating a prospect enables you to 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 profiling your leads progressively, refine your lead prospect analysis, determine a score based on 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. By means of a form on a landing page, you collect your audience's data, the personal information of your leads. This process is called lead nurturing. This is where lead management comes into its own: lead scoring becomes crucial in assessing the right communication for your prospect's state of mind, at a given moment. If you'd like to know more about the key concepts and vocabulary associated with inbound marketing, we've put together an article for you.
Lead scoring consists in qualifying and evaluating your prospects
The principle of lead scoring is as follows: assign each of your leads a score based on a number of criteria you've defined in advance. These criteria will be determined on the basis of the qualified information you obtain on your prospect. But also, and above all, according to your sales strategy and objectives. The lead scoring score therefore includes both behavioral data (what the customer does, how he interacts with you, his expressed or formulated needs, etc.) and commercial data (what your company wants, its development strategy, etc.). This score is automatically calculated by the prospecting software you use. Lead scoring is therefore part of a marketing automation logic. More than just a lead generator, it's a lead score generator. Lead scoring is a mechanism specific to digital inbound marketing. It stands in stark contrast to outbound marketing, which relies on more traditional techniques and 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 gathered on the web, it enables you to better assess your prospect's level of maturity. For example, you'll know very quickly where a given prospect stands 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,
- implement marketing automation actions to help move your lead through the conversion tunnel.
Lead scoring is a kind of breadcrumb trail, a system that accompanies your prospecting action 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 depends entirely on a well-defined lead nurturing process. The effectiveness of your sales approach depends on the totality 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, sales, etc.), Sparklane for Marketing offers hyper-criteria. These include, for example, growth indicators concerning the prospect, his distribution channels or his 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. With this tool, you can manage your prospecting with an unrelenting vision and expertise in marketing scoring.
Leverage data with marketing automation software
Relying on lead scoring for your prospecting actions can prove highly beneficial. First of all, the information obtained through this method will enrich your knowledge of your target markets. This in-depth knowledge will then help you contextualize your sales approach to your leads. This means you can tailor your approach to the customer's behavior or current situation. For this, you'll need lead generation software capable of giving you the right information at the right time. This is what Sparklane for Sales offers with business signals.
Business signals are topical information relevant to your prospect: product development, new executive appointment, partnership, fund-raising, etc. All this data is collected on Sparklane for Sales. All this data is collected on the Sparklane for Sales platform. Your sales rep can then build up a watch around those he or she deems relevant. Your sales rep will be notified by email or sms when news events occur on the watch he or she has programmed.
Your sales expert's prospecting action will therefore gain in relevance thanks to a 360° knowledge of the customer, made possible by Sparklane for Sales. Business signals provide your sales force with the ability to react quickly and, depending on the information received, contextualize their approach to (future) customers. In this case, lead scoring can even be predictive: the various data collected on your prospect are cross-referenced on the platform, enabling the sales rep to analyze and anticipate the prospect's behavior and needs.
To help you qualify your prospects, we've drawn up a list of criteria for you to consider:
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,
analyze site behavior, 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 papers, catalogs, guides, case studies, etc.
the buttons clicked by your prospect, which are the most effective call-to-actions,
completed request forms,
prospect reactions to your email automation,
interest in other subjects, other content,
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: while outbound marketing addresses the mass, as the media do, inbound marketing qualifies its lead, the digital communication to be addressed to it according to its state, at a given moment. The latter qualitative plan also includes the notion of a quantitative plan.
Using lead scoring in your prospecting activities should prove to be a very pertinent choice. This method enables 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 Sparklane's hyper-targeted segmentation and business signals, you can also contextualize your prospect approach and significantly increase your chances of conversion. This marketing software is an undeniable asset for your sales prospecting.
Article translated from French