How can lead scoring help B2B marketers prioritize leads and maximize ROI?

The Importance of Lead Scoring in B2B Marketing

Published in

Smart Sales Toolkit

2 min readJun 16, 2023

If you’re involved in B2B marketing, it’s essential to understand lead scoring.

Lead scoring is the process of assigning a value to a lead based on their level of engagement with your company.

This helps you prioritize which leads to follow up with and which are most likely to become customers.

This guide is for B2B marketers who want to improve their lead generation and conversion rates.

Define your ideal customer profile: Identify the characteristics of your best customers, such as job title, industry, company size, and location.
Create a scoring system: Assign points to each lead based on their engagement with your company, such as website visits, email opens, and content downloads.
Set thresholds: Determine the minimum score a lead must reach to be considered qualified and ready for sales follow-up.
Integrate with your CRM: Connect your lead scoring system with your customer relationship management (CRM) software to automate lead assignment and follow-up.
Continuously refine your scoring system: Regularly review and adjust your scoring criteria based on feedback from your sales team and changes in your target market.

Collaborate with your sales team: Involve your sales team in the lead scoring process to ensure alignment and buy-in.
Align with your buyer’s journey: Map your lead scoring system to your buyer’s journey to ensure you’re providing the right content and messaging at each stage.
Use a data-driven approach: Base your scoring criteria on data and analytics, not guesswork.
Regularly review and adjust: Continuously refine your scoring system based on feedback and results.

Let’s say you’re a B2B software company that sells a project management tool.

Your ideal customer profile is a project manager at a mid-sized company in the technology industry.

You create a lead scoring system that assigns points based on the following actions:

You set a threshold of 15 points for a lead to be considered qualified.

When a lead reaches this score, they’re automatically assigned to a sales rep for follow-up.

Your sales team reports that leads who request a demo have a much higher conversion rate than those who only attend a webinar.

Based on this feedback, you adjust your scoring system to give more points to leads who request a demo.

This leads to an increase in qualified leads and sales conversions.

Originally published at Smart Sales Toolkit.
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