Although not widely implemented by companies, lead scoring is a strategy that helps businesses classify their prospects according to the value each represents to them. In simple terms, lead scoring is an active filter that applies to each prospect, regardless of their position in the sales funnel. It is a way to classify incoming prospects and assign them priority levels. Your prospects will no longer be grouped based on distinguished similarities. Each of them will have their own score and category.
Lead scoring systems work by assigning specific values to each customer's activity as they move through the different stages of the sales funnel. Each of these actions earns a different number of points. When your prospect obtains a desirable total of points, they are considered a "potential prospect".
The purpose of lead scoring is to learn how to approach your customers to better guide them. You cannot use the same approach for all your customers, especially if they are at different stages of the buying journey. Thus, if you score your prospects correctly, you will know when and where to introduce soft sales and what is the ideal time for harder and more aggressive sales tactics.
Different lead scoring methods vary according to company characteristics.
Lead scoring is not useful for all commercial organizations. There are a few simple questions you should consider before deciding whether lead scoring can benefit your company or not.
Does your marketing team generate enough prospects? If your sales team isn't getting more prospects than they can handle, you probably don't need to spend time setting up a lead scoring system. Instead, encourage your marketing team to focus on bringing more prospects to the top of the funnel.
Did You Know?By automating your collaborators' email signature management, you can accelerate your business opportunities. How exactly? Your collaborators send more than 40 emails per day to your prospects, partners, or clients. Great trust is placed in messages sent by your collaborators. By integrating marketing banners into each of their emails, you will capitalize on a new communication channel that is non-intrusive, ultra-targeted, and inexpensive!
If your sales team isn't getting more prospects than they can handle, you probably don't need to spend time setting up a lead scoring system. Instead, encourage your marketing team to focus on bringing more prospects to the top of the funnel.
Is your sales team processing the prospects it acquires through marketing? Is your sales team complaining about the horrible prospects they receive? Is your marketing team complaining that Sales aren't following up with the prospects they've been given? Then you probably desperately need a service level agreement rather than a lead scoring system.
Organize a meeting with both departments and decide how many prospects marketing should provide to sales each month and how many the sales team should follow up with. Once you manage to set up your service level agreement, you can start considering lead scoring.
For this part, you will need behavioral data, contextual data, and company data about your prospects before you can even set up a lead scoring system. If you don't have the required data, you'll need to take some steps before you can even start lead scoring.
If you answered no to any of these questions, your commercial organization is not yet mature enough to implement relevant lead scoring.
Just as lead scoring improves the conversion rate of leads into opportunities, lead scoring also improves your closing rate. The closing rate represents the number of prospects you were able to convert into paying customers. According to an Eloqua study, based on the analysis of 10 B2B companies using lead scoring, it improved their closing rate by 30%.
Lead scoring serves to define the position of any customer within the funnel. This means that if you reach their ideal point from the start, they will move through the sales cycle much faster. Lead scoring helps maximize sales efficiency because it eliminates the need for guessing and waiting. Lead scoring therefore helps reduce the time to convert prospects into customers.
Being able to measure your return on investment on lead generation will show you exactly how valuable your marketing efforts are. If you know how much you're spending and how much it brings in, you'll be able to allocate your resources more effectively. This allows you to know which tactics aren't worth your time and effort.
Customer segments and personas are high-level groups of people who are interested in your content, services, products, and company at different levels.
To determine what your target market is, ask yourself:
Lead scoring goes beyond static demographic data and concerns the actual behavior of users.
The "five whys" can also help you delve deeper into each of them:
Consider these people as your marketing qualified prospects. They engage with your brand, but they haven't necessarily purchased yet.
The most important part of the lead scoring process is determining the characteristics of people most likely to buy.
When trying to understand the difference between high-engagement behaviors and low (or negative) engagement behaviors, you need to consider three basic types of criteria: explicit, implicit, or negative.
They tell you who the person is and whether or not they fit your ideal customer mold.
Explicit criteria metrics:
This is behavioral data that tells you how interested a person is in your service, product, or company. It doesn't tell you if they're suitable for your business, it simply indicates if they interact with your content.
For implicit criteria, consider metrics such as:
Some of this information is accessible especially if you have created a professional website.
These tell you exactly the opposite. It tells you about people you should start ignoring because they're simply not interested in you.
For negative criteria, consider occurrences such as:
When creating your point system, you want to assign more points to higher engagement actions and fewer points (or negative) to low engagement actions.
Here is an example of a lead scoring table based on activity:
Did You Know?By automating your collaborators' email signature management, you can accelerate your business opportunities. How exactly? Your collaborators send more than 40 emails per day to your prospects, partners, or clients. Great trust is placed in messages sent by your collaborators. By integrating marketing banners into each of their emails, you will capitalize on a new communication channel that is non-intrusive, ultra-targeted, and inexpensive!
Each time someone takes an action, they receive the points associated with that action. All points are added up to a total.
The higher the total, the more interested the prospect is. The lower the total, the more likely it is that you should let the prospect go.
To assign point categories and communicate them to your teams, ask yourself these questions:
For lead scoring, there are no universal benchmarks from other companies.
Instead, you must continuously test and refine your ideal customer assumptions so that your scoring system ultimately does what it’s meant to do: deliver high-value prospects, nurture those in the middle, and politely filter out the unqualified ones.
Work closely with your sales team and your SMB CRM system to identify issues and iterate until you achieve an effective lead scoring model.
Yes, with the 'Campaigns' offer, it is possible to track the number of clicks on the email signatures of all your employees in the 'Statistics' area of the platform.
You can then access a detailed or global view of the number of clicks on the email signatures of each employee. You can use the search option to target a specific signature or a given period. Finally, you have the possibility to export all statistics to an Excel document.
If you launch campaigns with banners inserted in your email signatures, you can also access their performance via this same space.
With Letsignit, you can easily add social network icons in your collaborators' email signatures and link to your company pages. Also, our "attributes" feature allows you to manage personalized URLs for each of your collaborators such as their individual LinkedIn profile.
And that's not all: you can add links to an appointment-setting application, allow your customers to leave reviews easily, and integrate our 'Chat on Teams' widget to let anyone start a discussion via Microsoft Teams chat.
It’s up to you! As an administrator of the Letsignit platform, you choose whether or not to grant modification rights to your employees. These permissions are managed on an attribute-by-attribute basis, which means that you can decide to allow the employee to change their phone number, but not the address of your premises, for example.
This feature applies to all attributes in your directory, including custom attributes created on Letsignit. When your employees change one or more attributes, your directory is obviously not affected.
It often happens that employees make their email signature their own: custom format, bad fonts, colors inconsistent with the brand standards... all of this has an impact on your brand!
A consistent visual identity is considered authentic and outperforms a perceived weak one by 20%. And, your customers are 2.4 times more likely to buy your products.
With Letsignit, take back control over your brand identity by standardizing all your email signatures. Our tool has many features that allow you to customize your signatures by department, by audience or by subsidiary. Not to mention the possibility of carrying out campaigns within your email signatures thanks to our Campaign offer.
What is the user experience like for our employees?
In both cases:
In short, they have autonomy in their email signature, but you keep control on the field, signatures, and banners they can edit or use.
With our "multi-signature" feature, your employees can benefit from multiple email signatures. No technical manipulation is required. Thanks to our Add-in for Outlook or the desktop app, they can change their email signatures as they wish with just a few clicks.
Regarding the creation of email signatures, you can make several variations such as:
Everything has been thought of to go further in the personalization process based on the recipient of your emails.
If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.
As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.
As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
