Many sales organizations have in place a means to judge and value their website visitors and business leads. But often much of the lead scoring criteria boils down to simply identifying these visitors and leads as “hot,” “warm,” or “cold” prospects. These days you can do better than that; there are many offerings in the marketplace today, including Optify, which provide you with lead scores that are much more direct, less vague, and ultimately more helpful.
Finding Common Ground Through Lead Scores
A key aspect of lead scoring is that scores give marketing and sales a way to gain common ground when discussing the quality of leads. Instead of discussing these things in vague terms, you can focus on real numbers linked to specific lead attributes important to your business.
Purpose of Scoring Visitors and Leads
When leads are effectively prioritized, sales teams have an effective way to decide on what leads to pursue. On the marketing end, lead scoring gives marketing a great way to quantify the value of leads from paid campaigns. Lead scoring helps to segment visitors and leads geographically, by level of interest, and by identifying what content areas on websites interests particular groups.
Optimize Your Sales Efforts by Scoring Leads AND Visitors
Lead scoring is particularly useful in those instances when a site has a high volume of visitors and leads. Use lead scoring to prioritize call activities for sales teams. With Optify you can easily segment leads into those who your sales group should contact directly and others who should be nurtured as ongoing prospects.
In cases with low lead volumes, scoring visitors (as opposed to leads) can enlarge your lead pool by identifying site visitors who are keenly interested in your product or service. In other cases, with large sales teams and large lead pools, lead scoring does wonders to effectively segment visitors and leads by the vertical industry they represent, geography, or product line they are interested in.
Lead Scoring: Recommendations from the Trenches
Lead scoring represents a new way for sales and marketing teams to use leads and we recommend that sales and marketing teams work together to best use this data. With a large enough organization we recommend assigning an individual to track ideas and update scores to account for criteria like site visitors who look at more than one page on your website or visit more than once. We also recommend incorporating target companies into the scores as well as geographically relevant leads, if you are geographically focused. We advise our clients to only update or add scores when there is clarity and agreement across departments as to goals. Lead scoring is a great way to start drilling down and examining high quality visitors and leads to see behavior patterns that will help to tune lead scores and ultimately improve the quality of leads pursued.
Optify Lead Scoring
Optify lead scoring is a key element of our online marketing platform. To create lead scores, we start by examining website behavior: where have visitors come from, how long do they spend on the site, and what specific areas of the site they visit? With a database of past behavior we incorporate information on past visits.
We also utilize research into which company a visitor represents and what city and state they are based in (based on their IP address). Beyond this critical information, our robust database also shows what size a company the visitor works for and what vertical industry they are a part of. When visitors enter information in an online website form, lead scoring tools also parse this visitor-supplied information. A visitor may enter his or her name, title, and company as well as contact information. Lead scoring can select from this data and assign related scores. A sales organization might, for example, assign a lower score to those contacts who have Hotmail or Gmail accounts and all this feeds into lead scores.
