If you want your sales team to be focused only on qualified and sales-ready leads, your company will have to establish an efficient lead management process – from demand generation to lead nurturing, to final hand-off to sales. In order to achieve your business goals and increase revenue, your marketing team needs to run sophisticated marketing campaigns to generate as many high-quality leads as possible. Once generated, intelligent lead scoring and prioritization process is required. The lead scoring is a sales and marketing methodology that assigns points and ranks leads to determine their sales-readiness. It is used to automate the ranking, grouping, routing and tracking of leads and is designed to ensure your company has a consistent process for lead management. The importance of accurate lead scoring cannot be underestimated:

• 45% of companies report that their sales reps need help figuring out which accounts to prioritize
• 80% of top performing companies use lead scoring as part of their lead qualification process

In addition, lead scoring makes it possible to funnel lead information directly to your sales teams. The activities of your sales team will be more efficient too, as the sales teams who prioritize their sales efforts are 18% more likely to achieve their revenue goals and 22% more likely to meet or beat their quota.

However, it is worth mentioning that an efficient lead scoring process needs to be tested, analyzed and tweaked regularly.  Make sure score-based hand offs to other teams or campaigns are happening properly. This will also help you flush out any indicators that turn out to not be useful. You must take into consideration the changing market dynamics, new products and optimize your scoring system accordingly.  Regular meetings with marketing and sales to review and update the most accurate scores are also necessary. More so, seamless integration of sales force automation and marketing automation on a single platform is imperative, as there is also a technical aspect behind transferring lead data into the sales pipeline. That’s why we advise you to download this practical eBook and learn the main benefits and key principals of lead scoring system.

Download eBook