Predictive lead scoring is changing the often-contentious dynamic between sales and marketing organizations. If you’ve ever worked in B2B sales or marketing, you’ve probably experienced this tension first-hand.
To oversimplify the dynamic between these two organizations, marketing is tasked with sourcing and qualifying leads, and sales is incented to convert these leads into paying customers. When sales are sluggish, marketing is blamed for sending poor-quality leads to the sales pipeline. Marketing in turn responds by blaming sales for spending too much time complaining about the leads and not enough time selling. Communication is at the heart of the problem. But aligning potentially thousands of salespeople with hundreds of marketers seems like a tall task.
The question becomes, how can we better support these two organizations to create a harmonious relationship that systematically drives top-line revenue growth?
How Predictive Lead Scoring Works
The first step in lead scoring is analyzing patterns from historical customer win/loss data in your marketing automation platform and CRM to find common criteria that make up your ideal target. Scoring leads using a real-time account-based model, including both explicit information (such as business firmographics, industry spend and job growth), and implicit behavioral data (such as web searches, white paper downloads and social activity), will determine a lead’s sales-readiness.
The more data you can find to help inform a lead’s intent, fit and propensity to buy your products, the better the lead score will perform. Remember though, garbage in is garbage out, so make sure you are purchasing high-quality data that is cleaned and updated on a regular cadence.
What Do I Do with a Lead Score?
By implementing a dynamic lead management strategy based on your lead scoring, you can create business processes and workflows to route leads to the right sales and marketing activities, at the right time, with the right message. If a lead scores on the lower end of your scale, it needs more nurturing from the marketing department, while a high-scoring lead can immediately be sent to sales with rationale as to why the lead is exhibiting buy signals.
How does an effective lead scoring model help sales and marketing work better together? Here are some of the key benefits:
Marketing targets more effectively. Using lead scores, marketers can:
- Understand which campaigns are driving the best leads, to optimize marketing spend
- Nurture leads that are not sales-ready, rather than delivering low-quality leads to sales
Sales becomes more efficient. Using lead scores, sales reps can:
- Focus sales efforts on prioritized leads that are most valuable and more likely to convert
- Close deals faster with account-based context and talking points
The return on investment (ROI) for purchasing lead-scoring functionality is very real because it improves visibility within the sales pipeline. Lead-scoring has the potential to:
- Increase sales productivity and effectiveness
- Improve conversion rate of leads to opportunities
- Reduce time to close
- Raise revenue per rep
Sales & Marketing Alignment: One Big, Happy Family
An effective lead-scoring program brings measurability, consistency, efficiency and control to the lead management process. Sales teams benefit from higher quality leads, which in turn improve their efficiency. Marketing understands how to spend its dollars in the right places and sees higher ROI from their investments. The benefit that will ultimately bring the most value to a company is strengthening the relationship between marketing and sales, so together they can in turn strengthen relationships with customers.