Tag Archive for: Lead Grading

Lead Liaison

Do You Know Which Leads Are More Likely To Become Customers?

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Do you know which leads are more likely to become customers?Do you know which leads are more likely to become customers? There’s nothing more exciting than a fresh new group of leads, all contacted through a successful marketing strategy and ready to be turned over to an eager sales staff. But as we all know an unfortunately small percentage of those leads, no how well they were acquired, will be ready to buy when they are contacted. So how do you know which leads are likely to become customers, and how do you help your staff contact those leads at the right time? Using a combination of tools available through Lead Liaison’s software and solutions you can help your marketing and sales staff capitalize on every opportunity.

Lead Liaison is able to offer these sorts of results by employing a variety of different approaches to information collection, analysis, and automated marketing solutions to keep leads engaged and accessible for the right moment for your team to make the sale. How does this work? It begins with the analysis of data gleaned from your website and other materials, which feeds into a sophisticated algorithm of lead grading and scoring to tell you’re sales team when a lead can be converted into a customer.

Analytics

One of the basic principles of creating an automated marketing solution for your company is gathering and examining the data that customers bring to your marketing team through their activity on your website and with other materials. Actions like web form conversion, email opens and social media activity inform your marketing team of what is working with customers and helps sales better understand the interest of their leads.

Buy signals are a real-time system of alerts that will communicate with your sales team when a potential lead performs an activity that exhibits a good chance to make a sale, such as a time-sensitive email click through or web form submission.

Lead Grading

Lead grading is a vital technique in helping your marketing team identify ideal buyers. Lead Liaison’s lead grading algorithms take a variety of factors into account, including job title, industry, geography and revenue to determine whether or not they are a good match for your product or service and thus would make a likely sale. These qualifications are fully customizable, letting your team develop the ideal customer for your company.

Using the data compiled by the lead grading algorithms, Lead Liaison’s software scores individual leads, and passes this data on to your sales team. Using the hot lead dashboard, Briefcase, your sales team will have all the information they need to know when a lead is ready to buy and have the information they need to make the sale. Information such as buy signals, overall activity and lead grade is delivered into the engine to create a complete picture of your potential customers.

Lead Liaison’s tools for helping your team know which leads are more likely to be converted to customers don’t end there. Visit our marketing automation blog to learn more about practices such as lead nurturing, which helps you turn cold leads into warm one.

 

Lead Liaison

Lead Scoring vs. Lead Grading

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Lead Scoring vs. Lead GradingWithin the B2B marketing niche, the term “lead score” often refers to the quantification of the behaviors and attributes of a marketing lead. But a lead’s score is typically just one component in a lead qualification matrix.  A lead’s total rating (hot, warm or cold) is actually a combination of a lead grade and a lead score. In this post we will compare lead scoring vs. lead grading to help you understand the differences.

Lead Grade

Marketing leads are graded in most scoring models according to attributes which define the individual and associated business that has responded to a marketing contact. For example, company size – as measured by number of employees – is used to rank the lead’s physical presence within its industry. Grades for attributes are used to determine the lead’s fit within an optimal lead profile. The ranking system used by many automated marketing programs assigns letters such as A, B, C, etc. to leads, usually giving an A for the highest grade attainable.

Lead qualification matrices typically calculate an average of several attribute grades into a composite grade for a sales opportunity. Categories such as location, revenues, title and industry are often included in the calculation. It’s important to keep in mind that a lead can achieve a high grade but a low score due to low level of interest, as measured by its marketing engagement activities.

Lead Score

Marketing leads are scored according to specific activities that indicate interest in a certain solution. Scoring values are typically represented by numbers. Many lead scoring matrices calculate the average score for all activities, which can then be used to determine if the interest level meets the minimum ranking needed to pursue a prospect.

The lead scoring matrix should include both the type of interest and activity level exhibited by your prospect. Examples of scoring criteria include:

Interest Type

  1. Product Demo Request
  2. Video View
  3. White Paper Download
  4. Email Click-through

Activity Level

  1. Number of Web Page Views
  2. Duration of Webinar Attendance
  3. Number of Emails Opened

Bear in mind that a level of interest in one solution may not translate to interest in other solutions offered by your company. To determine whether a lead would make a good cross-sell or up-sell customer may require a sales engagement or a separate marketing campaign.

Applying Weight and Default Values

Within a lead qualification matrix, some behaviors and attributes are weighted to account for the importance of certain factors. For instance, a prospect’s title may be weighted more heavily than company size. The weight for a certain behavior or attribute is typically represented by multiplying a grade or score by a factor of two through five.

Marketing automation users can assign default values that may differ from company to company. Determining appropriate default values for lead grading and lead scoring is a matter of preference. One company may use a default score of 10 for opening a marketing email, whereas another company may use a default score of 25. The key is to be consistent in assigning default values across all marketing campaigns.

Lead Liaison

Why Businesses Need Lead Grading and Lead Scoring

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Why Businesses Need Lead Grading and Lead ScoringEvery lead that comes in contact with a given website has the potential to be converted into a sale at some point or another. In fact, 98% of all website visitors never submit a form, which means they could go completely undetected. That is why marketing automation has become so vital to the success of modern marketing campaigns. Marketing automation captures these potential leads for further marketing and nurturing that is more customized to the individual lead. Let’s have a look at why businesses need lead grading and lead scoring.

Marketing Automation Needs to Prioritize Leads

Lead grading and lead scoring are vital to any marketing organization. Marketing automation brings in an abundance of leads, however, today’s marketing departments still need to solve the problem of determining a lead’s potential and how long it will take before a lead is ready for sales. The sales department does not have time to pursue every individual who comes in contact with a related website. Lead grading and lead scoring prioritize each lead making the entire process more efficient. It also assists the marketing department in making their content more relevant to each unique lead. That is exactly why businesses need lead grading and lead scoring.

Lead Scoring

Scoring specifically refers to the interest level of the individual lead. A lead score may be calculated based on a number of parameters such as email clicks, web form submissions, number of visits, page views, clicks on links, and file downloads. The more someone clicks on your emails and visits your site, the more interested they probably are in your products or services. Unfortunately their level of interest doesn’t always mean they are a good fit for your business. That is where grading becomes necessary.

Lead Grading

Grades are based on explicit factors such as industry, company size, budget, or job title. Where lead scoring dives into their behavior and interests, grading explores a prospect’s demographic profile. Leads are ranked based on how close the prospect is to a predetermined ideal customer profile. Matching demographics is not a guarantee for sales, but it does improve the likelihood.

The Need for Both

Judging a lead based only on their demographic profile won’t work well on its own, since it doesn’t indicate their interest in a product or service. That is why it takes a combination of both to generate more sales-ready leads. Lead score must access their behavioral attributes based on their activity, while lead grading cross-references their potential compared to predetermined demographic characteristics.

Lead grading and scoring work together to give you an in depth look into a prospect’s likelihood of becoming a sale. This powerful combination is the most effective way to qualify and prioritize leads for marketing automation. Once leads have been graded and scored, the chance of conversion will be significantly higher.

Lead Liaison is one of the few companies in the industry that provides a professional and easy to use implementation of both lead grading and lead scoring. Let us know if you’d like to learn more!