Inbound marketing is great at helping you attract prospects to your website and drive a significant volume of leads into your marketing funnel.
According to HubSpot, “83.9 percent of companies using inbound marketing increase leads within seven months.”
However, with a large number of traffic coming in at once, it can become difficult to separate the good leads from the bad. Implementing a solid lead qualification process will help ensure that only sales-ready leads are delivered to the sales team.
Lead scoring enables you to qualify, track and rank each of the prospects coming in. Scoring factors are weighted on observed and inferred criteria, including visitor behavior, a person’s job title and industry, content downloads, form completions, etc.
Visitors that demonstrate much higher engagement rates with your site and have a tagged decision-maker title will warrant a higher score, since they are better informed (finalizing the consideration process) and more likely ready to talk to a sales rep to initiate the buying process.
For example, a lead at a vice-president level may be ranked higher than an intern who is also an active visitor to your site. Both may be demonstrating the same type of website behavior (i.e. downloading X number of case studies), but a VP often controls the buying decision and has final approval authority.
LEAD QUALIFICATION
Once a lead qualification process is set in place with inbound marketing automation, managing your leads will take minimal day-to-day effort. The marketing automation platform will create profiles for each site visitor, ranking each based on your designated criteria. A system of workflows will trigger an internal email notification detailing the proper time when a lead is ready to be contacted by a sales person.
Lead scoring will take time when first starting out and adjustments to the scoring criteria may be required, but ultimately you’ll maximize your sales team time with delivering only qualified sales-ready leads
Before embarking on this new marketing endeavor, remember to first focus on actually generating leads, gather plenty of prospect data then you can direct your energy toward implementing a lead scoring program.
At Elevation Marketing, we specialize in driving top-of-funnel traffic with inbound marketing lead generation. With that in mind, we put together a guide — Nurturing and Recycling Leads to Drive Sales — to provide you deeper insight into the entire lead generation journey.
Download our guide and gain unprecedented marketing insights from our expert B2B marketers. Yes, we will score your download.