In lead scoring, you score the quality of your B2B leads using several criteria. You can score leads based on various factors, such as the lead’s information quality and engagement level with your website and business. This process improves your team’s ability to prioritize leads, provide timely responses, and close more deals. Let us discuss how you can optimize your B2B lead generation using lead scoring.
How to do lead scoring of B2B leads?
Here are some ways in which you can score your B2B leads:
1. Demographic data
Are you targeting a specific group of people, such as CxOs or VPs, for your sales efforts? Answers to demographic inquiries on your landing page forms can help you determine how well they align with your ideal customer profile.
Using this data, you can filter out prospects who aren’t likely to buy from you by assigning them fewer points if they belong to a demographic you don’t target. If your business is restricted to a specific area, you might penalize leads who do not come from the correct city, state, zip code, country, etc.
Leads who submit information in required fields (such as a phone number) and provide information in optional fields (such as a zip code) may be rewarded with additional points.
2. Firmographic data
As a business-to-business company, do you prefer selling to a specific range of customers based on factors like size, sector, or other characteristics? Questions like these can be included in the forms on your landing pages to identify prospects who are a good fit for your business and those who aren’t.
3. Engagement Data
A lead’s level of interest in purchasing from you can be gauged partly by how they engage with your website. Consider the prospects who become paying customers: Which offers did they download? How many freebies did they sign up for? How often did they visit your website, and which pages did they look at before making a purchase?
You must carefully consider the quantity and variety of forms and pages. Leads who engage with high-value content or fill high-value forms may be rewarded with a higher score. Similarly, you may reward prospects according to the number of times they visited your site.
4. Social media engagement
A lead’s level of interest can also be gauged by their interaction with your company on social media. What percentage of your company’s tweets and Facebook posts were clicked by interested parties? It would be interesting to know how many times they retweeted or shared those items. You can score leads based on how much they interact with your social media accounts and the levels of engagement they show.
Is lead scoring the right way to go?
Lead scoring isn’t the best approach for businesses that sell items or services with a higher annual contract value (ACV). Unlike with low ACV solutions, the buying considerations, in this case, are more complex.
An expensive purchase needs more time and input from more people before making a final choice. Such businesses that sell high ACV solutions primarily focus on large enterprises rather than small and medium businesses (SMBs) because of the former’s substantial purchasing power vis-a-vis the latter.
Lead scoring lacks much functionality in the B2B world, where purchasing cycles are becoming more intricate by the day. When a business that sells to other businesses considers that a single lead or individual can make a purchase decision on behalf of an enterprise, it ignores the input of key stakeholders, as well as the importance of the available budget.
Account scoring is now the way to go in the enterprise market, where companies typically consider between seven and ten stakeholders when making purchases.
Are you scoring leads or accounts
Prospective clients are ranked from most likely to least likely to become paying customers in the account scoring system. This is a critical step in building a qualified sales pipeline. You can identify opportunities and generate demand in the shape of companies rather than individuals when you apply the account score framework. This has the benefit of standardizing the messaging for the entire buyer cohort. Lead scoring can cause some uncertainty, but account scoring eliminates that possibility.
