How to Get Your SDRs On Board with Lead Scoring with Salesforce
Generating leads is one of the most difficult and frustrating challenges for any sales team. And once they generate the leads, SDRs face a new dilemma: how to prioritize them? In a perfect world, SDRs would instinctively know which leads were the most qualified, the most in need of the product, and the most ready to buy. But in reality, this isn’t the case. Left to their own devices, SDRs will use their past experiences with prospects to guide their decision making process.
So how do we prevent this fragmentation and have an accurate way to assess which leads are, in fact, the best? Enter lead scoring.
Lead scoring provides an objective and measurable framework for sorting leads, eliminating the confusion of trying to manually sort leads based on an individual rep’s experience and biases. Lead scoring will help your SDRs prioritize their leads, maximize their productivity, and ultimately boost your revenue.
What is lead scoring, anyway?
Essentially, lead scoring is the process of numerically ranking incoming leads on a scale where you can see their aptitude to translate into sales.
A number of factors determine these scores. A prospect’s explicit characteristics-such as location, industry, company revenue, and job title-are helpful in determining how close they are to your ideal customer. Optimizing and enriching your data will give you the most accurate and detailed portrait possible of your prospect.
(Source: Hubspot)
The prospect’s implicit characteristics (i.e. interest in your product) is also crucial to determining their lead score. Behaviors such as visiting pricing pages, opening emails, engaging with content would all indicate buying behavior and would raise the lead score accordingly.
(Source: Hubspot)
Benefits of lead scoring
Lead scores give SDRs a holistic view of their entire prospect list, with numerous data points that would be tedious, if not impossible, to uncover manually. With lead scoring, all of these data points get tracked and updated in real time, providing instant clarity on what leads to prioritize and what leads to leave on the back burner.
This prioritization not only boosts productivity, but also profit. In fact, 68% of marketers cite lead scoring as a primary contributor to driving revenue.
Lead scoring also simplifies the sales forecasting process, providing a clear picture of each SDRs pipelines and what lead flow is necessary to achieve that month’s goals.
Automating your lead prioritization process will shorten your sales cycle. By giving SDRs key information, they can tailor their sales presentations for maximum impact and avoid wasting time on areas that the prospect isn’t interested in.
Your marketing team will receive important data, as well. By knowing the exact factors of your hottest prospects, they can tailor their campaigns to drive more of the best leads to your SDRs. A Marketing Sherpa study showed 77% increase in lead generation ROI for teams using lead scoring.
Why SDRs resist lead scoring?
Despite the obvious benefits of lead scores, SDRs tend to resist relying on them. Why?
The answer is typically due to a mis-alignment between the marketing and sales teams. If your marketing team is creating lead scores in a silo and using arbitrary data points, then the SDR’s skepticism is justifiable.
Your lead score needs to reflect your ideal customer profile. What factors actually determine a prospect’s likelihood of becoming a customer?
Sometimes, it’s a lack of transparency from the marketing team that is causing the lack of buy-in. Giving the SDRs insight into what informs the lead scoring process, as well as listening to the sales team’s insights on trends they have noticed, will go a long way in establishing trust and increasing the likelihood that they’ll integrate the lead scores into their workflow.
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