If you want a successful sales funnel within your business, you need to make sure that you develop your leads correctly. It requires you to have a robust lead scoring system that accurately tells you where in the purchasing path a lead is, promptly. If you don’t know when a lead is ready to speak to your sales team, you will miss the opportunity or annoy them.
So how can you score your leads to ensure they are willing to speak to a member of your sales team? Here are some of the best practices.
1. Define the Perfect Client
Your first step is to ensure that you know who your target audience is. The best idea is to create that ideal client profile in as much detail as possible. Give them a name, job, address, marital status, if they have children, their hobbies, etc. The more detail you have, the better you will understand your target market and recognize the behaviors required to move them onto the next step.
2. Define Actions That Mean They Are Interested
Only looking at one of your blog pages does not mean the contact is ready to speak to your brand. Other actions might be more indicative of their readiness to become a customer. Therefore, define the actions that demonstrate a high interest and ensure that your entire marketing and sales teams know them.
Careful monitoring of their purchasing path is also required here.
3. Segment Your Audience
Different audiences will need other approaches when it comes to tracking their actions and what content you market to them. Without segmenting your audience into different groupings, you can’t be optimizing your time spent marketing or selling to them.
4. Write a Lead Scoring Formula
Next, you need to assign a score for each audience attribute and action. These scores will then be placed within a formula that can help you identify where a lead is in the entire buying cycle. Once they have reached a certain score, you can, for example, email them an offer or instruct your sales team to contact them. It also helps you in what offer to contact your lead with. A higher scored lead will be more interested in your product and require less of a push than someone with a lower score.
5. Create a Service Level Agreement
You need a plan of action for a sales lead once it has entered your sales funnel. It should include all the marketing the lead is exposed to, what steps should be taken by the lead and how sales will follow up. Everything needs to include a timeline (with some buffer zones).
6. Communicate With the Entire Team
Communication is another important aspect. Ensure that everyone in your sales and marketing teams understands your sales funnel, lead scoring system and what happens at each stage. It prevents mistakes from happening. For example, people contacting a lead too early.
7. Test Your System
Always ensure that you have put your system through a rigorous testing stage before you let it go live. It will help you smooth out any problems and refine the process so that your leads are scored correctly and contacted at the right time. During this task, it is best to run a random assortment of leads through the scoring model you have devised from across the buyer’s journey. Carefully monitor the results to ensure that no mistakes are being made.
Conclusion
A robust lead score system is vital if you want your business to grow. Knowing when your potential customers are ready to speak is an art of scoring them based on attributes and actions. It can become a science with careful monitoring and development of a system.
How do you score leads? Do you have a system in place?
Let us know in the comments below.
Take Action:
- Create a lead scoring system.
- Create a system to monitor leads based on your scoring system.
- See the results.