Lead scoring in the B2B sector
Lead scoring in the B2B sector
How to increase your efficiency and maximize success
The more your company knows about your contacts, the more accurately they fit your ideal customer profile, and the more engaged they are, the more likely you can convert them from simple website visitors to buyers. Efficient marketing involves separating the wheat from the chaff. It is particularly worthwhile to prioritize high-quality contacts and then focus your sales activities on them. In this article, you will learn how to properly classify your contacts using lead scoring and achieve maximum success.
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is a data-driven method to evaluate leads, which are contacts that have not made a purchase yet, based on their engagement and suitability for your company. The goal is to assess the leads' readiness to become buyers, prioritize the most promising contacts, and hand them over to your sales department. This helps optimize marketing and sales activities and ensures that your sales team focuses on the most valuable contacts. A contact with a low lead score has no intention to purchase yet but has shown interest. A medium score indicates consideration to purchase, while contacts with a high lead score are already ready to make a decision. This classification helps you determine the needs of your target audience along the customer journey and tailor your approach accordingly. The better you can assess contacts, the smoother the path to conversion will be.
Benefits of Lead Scoring in the B2B sector at a glance
The implementation of a lead scoring system advances B2B companies at various levels of the sales process:
Increase in efficiency: While marketing develops contacts with low to medium scores, the Focus sales on contacts with high potential.
Better collaboration: A clear scoring model improves the alignment between marketing and sales.
Higher Return on Investment: The Targeted communication with relevant contacts leads to faster closures and cost savings.
By implementing a structured lead scoring model, you create a solid foundation to consistently fill your pipeline and increase your revenues.
Approach to Lead Scoring
An efficient lead scoring is based on two key criteria:
Engagement: Analyze the interactions of your contacts, such as website visits, downloads, or webinar sign-ups. This implicit behavior shows how engaged a contact is with your company.
Suitability: Evaluate how well a contact fits your ideal customer profile. Factors such as position, industry, or company size play a role in this assessment. You can extract this data, for example, from a form that you place before a whitepaper download on your website.
The combination of these two criteria results in the lead score, which ranks the contacts clearly and thus facilitates targeted communication and further development.
Evaluation of key criteria
Once the criteria are determined, it is time to make the differences of the contacts tangible. Various scoring models have established themselves for this purpose: For suitability, different manifestations (e.g. 'project manager' vs. 'production manager') of a specific aspect (e.g. position) are assigned point values that reflect the importance of the position for your sales process. There are also different aspects for the dimension 'engagement'. An example is commitment, which is lower, for instance, when signing up for a newsletter than when participating in a webinar. Simple scoring models aggregate the ratings of suitability and engagement into a single score. Special attention must be paid to the meaningfulness of such a combined score. For example, if all contacts with a score of >80 points are to be classified as 'sales-ready', it must be clear how a contact can achieve such a value. Keep in mind: Some contacts may never make an active decision due to their low position, but they may indirectly influence it through their activities. Others may have a decision-making position but have had no interaction with their company for years. This should affect the scores you assign and the relationship between suitability and engagement.
Practical Examples: Scoring Models and Labels
The following model combines engagement and suitability in a matrix. Contacts with high scores (e.g. A1) are immediately sales-ready. Medium contacts (e.g. B2) require further lead development, while low-rated contacts are approached less frequently.
Alternatively, you can use the so-called "temperature method", where cold contacts are considered the least valuable, while hot contacts are considered the most valuable. With this flexible system, you can define your own criteria and thresholds that are perfectly tailored to your marketing goals. For example, suitability and engagement can be combined or used individually for classification. A contact can be considered "hot" if they reach a score of 80/100 or if they have an engagement of 80 while also having a suitability of 30.
Using lead scoring effectively
After evaluation, you can effectively segment your contacts and implement personalized marketing campaigns. Define clear handover points between marketing and sales to ensure smooth collaboration. Lead scores help optimize the lead nurturing process by ensuring that relevant content is delivered to the appropriate target groups at the right time.
Conclusion
Lead scoring is an essential tool for B2B companies looking to optimize their marketing and sales strategies. It increases efficiency, boosts conversion rates, and enhances collaboration between teams. Use this method to better understand your contacts and ensure long-term success. We recommend downloading our free scoring template or scheduling a personalized consultation to fully leverage the potential of lead scoring for your company.
Share this post