How Lead Scoring Can Qualify Potential Clients for More Sales

Are your sales not growing despite more effort?
Does your business have a large database of leads but don’t know where to focus on the best?
Depending on the type of products or services your company has to offer lead scoring can help you hone in on more specific information from your prospects such as the number of professional contacts for B2B sales, the level of interest based on filled out forms and page views, or the size of a company in a given industry.
According to Wikipedia, “Lead Scoring allows a business to customize a prospect’s experience based on his or her buying stage and interest level and greatly improves the quality and “readiness” of leads that are delivered to sales organizations for followup.”
Before diving into the process your business will need to first implement several factors:
• Build a list of qualified leads through email signup forms, social media, contests, ect.
• Call on the current list of contacts first before conducting your research.
• Gather enough data on your subscribers and leads to help determine their potential.
• Hire a sales person or team to assist in lead qualification research.
Once your business is ready to qualify your prospects through lead scoring you will be better able to streamline your sales by reaching out to warm prospects who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer. These high value leads have the potential of increasing your bottom line significantly as well as improving your marketing strategy.
There are two ways of determining the right sales leads for your business, which include a traditional method of lead scoring and a predictive one. Let’s take a look at the first option:

Tradition Lead Scoring

This has been the most common way to perform research, and is largely based on human intuition or an educated guess rather than on exact data or numbers. The problem with this typing of scoring is that customer behaviors and markets can change, in which case you may not have the most accurate information available. The research can become very complex and businesses typically need to manually find data such a geographical location and responses to different product lines or services.
Lead scores are generated based on two methods with the first being “explicit” information, which is what the prospects are actually telling you such as their email address, budget size, type of company, ect. The second is “implicit” information, which is based on digital actions like click-thru rates, subscriptions to your blog, ect.

Predictive Lead Scoring

In a less simplified yet comprehensive approach this method of research provides information from your CRM and marketing automation data of your top customers and leads with a more exact probability of who will make a purchase. This can include demographics, company revenue, social media activity, and data from online forms.
Through an automated algorithm process your business can more clearly define commonalities of your contacts as well as who would be the most qualified to approach for lead nurturing.  The system also shows you which customers are most likely to leave and why, which can also help improve your communication and content marketing approach.
According to Fileboard, a sales development company, B2B organizations are starting to rely more on predictive lead scoring, and have seen a 24 percent increase over the last two years:

Businesses that have built a large database of customers and prospects can greatly benefit from lead scoring research. With more precise date you can not only learn more about who your target market is, but waste less time when approaching your prospects. Use this valuable information to increase sales, write better content, and attract more qualified leads.
If you are ready to take advantage of predictive lead scoring software applications there is a full list here to check out, many of which are offered at a low cost for small business budgets.