What types of classifications does lead scoring cover?

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You already know that one of the great advantages of Inbound Marketing is the opportunity to attract a large number of leads to your company. But even if you already have a strategy in place and the leads are coming in, you still have another challenge ahead of you: qualifying each one of them.

Without proper qualification, your sales team will waste time with people who are not advertising database ready to buy and you will have a bigger job generating new leads.

This is why lead scoring exists, a technique that helps increase the efficiency of Inbound Marketing and makes the companies that apply it more solid.

Do you want to know how lead scoring works? Then keep reading, because we are going to show you right now!

What is lead scoring?

What is the importance of lead scoring for your business?
What criteria can be analyzed to perform lead scoring?
6 steps to lead scoring perfection
6 mistakes that are often made when it comes to lead scoring
After lead scoring, what should you do?
The innovative role of interactivity in lead scoring
5 useful tools for a more complete lead scoring
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is, in simple terms, a way of classifying your potential customers by points. These points are used to determine who is ready to buy or not.

Once a lead receives a score that is deemed acceptable by the company, it is passed on to the sales team to try to close the deal.

This score is defined based on the lead's profile compared to the company's persona and also by their actions during the purchasing journey .

Therefore, the closer the lead profile is to your established persona, the more points they earn.

At the same time, their actions (such as downloading rich materials, answering surveys, etc.) also count points, as they indicate interest in your message.

What types of classifications does lead scoring cover?
There are three types of leads that are quite popular when we talk about their proximity to the moment of making the purchase decision and their compatibility with the profile of the company's ideal client.

Information-Qualified Leads (IQL)
IQLs, or Information Qualified Leads, are leads that fit the profile of your ideal customer and who, despite having provided you with personal information, have not yet shown real interest in your specific solution.

It could be a lead who is interested in the topics you cover and has downloaded an ebook, for example, but who is not yet interested in purchasing.

This type of lead will only have greater value for you if they have other interactions that show you that they are evolving and maturing towards the purchasing process .

Marketing-Qualified Leads (MQL)
MQLs, or marketing qualified leads , are those who find in your brand a solution to satisfy a need they already have. In other words, they are already showing interest in what you can offer them.

They may have been converted by downloading an ebook that tells you that you have the solution to solve their problem and that with the material they have downloaded, they also know it.

Sales-Qualified Leads (SQL)
SQLs are sales qualified leads. In other words, they are leads that are ready to buy your product or service and if they receive an offer in the right way, they are more likely to accept it.

One of the actions that tells you that a lead is an SQL is free trials and demos.

If a potential customer requests a trial of a product or service, it's a great indicator that they're ready to buy.

These are the leads that can become future clients, however, there are also cold leads that are those that do not fit the profile of your ideal client nor are they interested in your products or services now or will be in the future.

What is the importance of lead scoring for your business?
Lead scoring is one of the most important tactics when a company starts generating a good number of leads from Inbound Marketing.

After all, not every lead is created equal, and salespeople shouldn't be forced to rely on luck when choosing who to approach.

The better you know your leads , the greater your chances of reaching out to only those who are ready to become customers , and that's where lead scoring helps.

The result is the 3 benefits you will see below:

Cost reduction
From the moment you invest in lead scoring, your company starts spending less on sales and marketing. Why?

The answer is simple. Marketing and sales teams will spend less time nurturing and engaging leads to achieve the same conversion rate they had before.

This means reducing the CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) by shortening the average sales cycle time and spending fewer resources to win over each customer. With the reduced CAC value, the savings for the company are greater.

Identifying successful content
Another of the great advantages that lead scoring provides is deploying a technique that allows the possibility of obtaining valuable information about the content that most interests your audience.

Thanks to these insights, your strategy can be strengthened and oriented towards those products or services that meet those interests, and even change course to align with the requirements of your market.

A fact that provides the opportunity to develop and disseminate personalized materials and messages that manage to positively impact potential clients.

Collaboration
As a methodology designed and implemented through two essential areas of a business — Sales and Marketing — it is an initiative that allows for the development of collaborative projects that favor the conversion of leads into company clients.

Analyze the quality of leads
Lead scoring, as its concept defines it, is a business opportunity qualification strategy.

In this way, your company will be able to have accurate and timely information on contacts who are ready to buy and, in this sense, improve your billing.

Segmentation
Your company's lead database, if not organized according to the stage each contact is in, can become a real disaster for your objectives.

Lead scoring allows you to differentiate a lead that is at the beginning of its process from those that are very close to closing it. It gives you the possibility of directing each one of them towards processes that favor their subsequent conversion into clients.

This provides the possibility of creating specific strategies and plans that are aimed at specific lead groups.

Promote marketing automation
Marketing automation is a methodology that allows processes or workflows to be accelerated through various technological tools.

Lead scoring is an automation technique in itself, since it facilitates the execution of lead nurturing based on the interests, tastes and needs of users that fit the characteristics of the brand's products and services.

Taking advantage of measurement tools
Lead scoring is a methodology capable of providing a detailed and broad perspective of the evolution of business opportunities.

In addition, it is ideal for personalizing marketing strategies for each of the leads in the funnel, with content, products and services that may be of more interest to them.

All of this facilitates and takes advantage of the use of measurement tools that are deployed in the organization, increasing their ROI and giving them greater importance in the processes.

For example, the case of the various Inbound Marketing initiatives that will benefit from the measurement of business opportunities and enhanced by the resulting data that will allow for personalized and directed lead attraction campaigns.

Increased productivity
The time gained in the sales cycle can be used by the professionals involved to generate new business and retain existing customers.

The marketing team will focus their efforts on the leads that are closest to the ideal score, but will still be able to follow up on the others, through automated nurturing flows .

For this reason, you will need to generate and prepare a smaller number of leads for the sales team to address in order to achieve the established conversion goals .

This way, the sales team will not spend unnecessary time approaching leads that are not close to buying and will be able to be more accurate in direct contacts.

Most effective strategies
Generating and nurturing leads requires a number of strategies in place, including content marketing and lead nurturing flow.

It is also necessary to have a strong presence on social media and to use email marketing accurately.

As your lead scoring process matures, it's possible to apply a kind of reverse analysis to see, for example, which content was most successful among leads that made a purchase.

It is also possible to discover patterns in the language used to interact with them and on social networks, the most effective email and landing page variations.

This way, you can replicate the most successful actions frequently and achieve better results consistently. This will ultimately lead to what we call predictable income.


What criteria can be analyzed to perform lead scoring?
Defining the criteria that can be analyzed to obtain the lead score will depend on the specific needs and characteristics of each business. There is no magic formula that can be applied to any company, since each organization must define what is relevant to it.

However, to help you, you can do the following. It is important to measure two main aspects, the user profile and their interest.

To determine your profile, you can use your buyer persona as a guide and from there analyze the characteristics of the leads that become consumers more quickly.

For example, if your product or service is corporate, the data you can see from the profile are:

Workstation.
Professional title.
Service time.
Company segment.
Company location.
Company size.
And/or other information that you consider relevant to your business.
Likewise, you can identify their level of interest by analyzing the following:

Types of materials you downloaded.
Newsletter subscription .​
Nutrition flows in which he participated.
Interactions on your website.
Pages you visited.
Emails you received/opened.
Participation in webinars.
Time that is related to your company.
Request a free trial or product demo.
And/or other information important to your organization.
These are just examples of what you can analyze, however, it is up to you to evaluate what is best to identify the leads with the greatest potential for your business.

In the same way, you should give weights to the different criteria; if you are not yet familiar with them and their importance is not very well defined, you can give equal weights to each criterion.

Later, as you develop this strategy, you will be able to notice what is really important for your business and improve your scoring system.

6 steps to lead scoring perfection
As you may have noticed, the concept of lead scoring is not that complicated. But, even so, the implementation of this evaluation technique should not be done in any way.

As with all digital marketing strategies , it is necessary to plan well in advance, as well as monitor the results afterwards and learn from them.

With that in mind, we have listed 6 steps you should follow to ensure that your lead scoring work really pays off:

1. Define MQL and SQL
You've probably already noticed that lead scoring is a strategy that directly benefits the work of marketing and sales teams.

It is therefore essential that both sectors work together to implement it. In other words, if Ventarketing is not yet used in your company, now is the time.

The first step is for the two teams to meet to define what constitutes an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) and an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead).

Basically, MQLs are the leads that still need to be nurtured by marketing, while SQLs are those that need to be passed on to sales staff immediately.

Defining these two groups from the start will make the role of each sector clear and facilitate the creation of a scoring system that matches the reality of the business.


2. Rely on the data your lead base offers
The second step is to use the data you already have about your lead base to make a good classification and define the score that each one should receive.

But here's an important tip: to have a complete lead scoring, it's necessary to divide your evaluation into two main types of data: demographic and behavioral.

It is the combination of these two groups that should form the final score for each lead. Take a look at each of them:

Demographics: Information such as age, income, and job title. This is basically the profile of the lead. The closer it is to your persona description, the better;
Behavioral data: How much does the lead interact with your company? Have they downloaded any important content? Are they subscribed to your newsletter? This data tells you more about the lead’s interest.
By combining demographic and behavioral data, your score will be more balanced and accurate.

In the end, it is useless to have a lead with the best profile and zero interest, or one who is totally interested but does not fit the ideal profile .

3. Determine the activation score
The activation score is nothing more than the cut-off line between an MQL and an SQL, that is, when the lead should pass from the marketing team to the sales team .

Again, it is important that this decision is made jointly by the marketing and sales teams, to avoid problems later.

By determining the activation threshold, it will be easier to move on to the next step, which is to decide what grades will be given for each factor that counts in favor of the lead in the purchasing journey.

4. Create a scoring pattern
Defining a scoring pattern is the next logical step on the journey to perfect lead scoring. But what does this mean?

For each action a lead takes, or for each positive demographic characteristic it presents, a score must be assigned.

But the points should not be defined randomly, much less distributed equally for all actions and characteristics.

Activities that have more weight in pushing the lead further down the funnel should receive a higher score, while less important activities should receive lower scores.

This will prevent candidates from being classified as smart only by the number of positive actions they perform and will prioritize more realistic evaluation criteria.

5. Make good use of negative punctuation
Punctuation doesn't have to be all positive. It's a good thing that it isn't, by the way. Using negative punctuation is a good practice worth following. Why?

By using negative points, you can more easily maintain the balance we are referring to between the profile and the interest of the leads, as we mentioned before.

For example, let's suppose that the activation threshold is 50 points and a certain lead has shown so much interest that they even exceed that score.

However, the lead in question does not have the right profile, perhaps because he or she is not the decision-maker at the company where he or she works.

This way, no matter what your grade is, it is not useful to send it to a seller, the sale will never be closed.

By using negative scoring, you could easily lower that lead's score for having a lower job title than necessary and avoid future problems.

Remember that the goal is to find people who are already ready to become customers, not simply to get as many people as possible to reach a specific score.

6. Continue improving the strategy
The secret to making lead scoring work is to make it a never-ending process. There is no perfect way to score or evaluate leads.

It is necessary to be aware that this effort is continuous and must always be improved based on previous results.

Therefore, pay constant attention to your lead scoring, and learn to make it more and more effective.

All of the steps I've described here can be done manually, but there are also great tools to automate your work.

There is an interesting recommendation regarding choosing between manual work or an automation tool: start manually and automate later.

This way, you'll better understand the logic behind lead scoring and achieve even better results in the future.

But if you prefer to even start automating your scoring or if your number of generated leads is too high to work with manually, no problem.


6 mistakes that are often made when it comes to lead scoring
When implementing lead scoring, some fairly common errors can arise. That's why we'll show you them below so you don't run the risk of making them.

1. Start from assumptions, not data
We have millions of data at our disposal and there is nothing better than taking advantage of them.

Even if we have a keen intuition, it is best to base it on real information, only then will we have a true basis for making the best decisions.

Therefore, when defining the criteria to be analyzed, it is essential to base it on real data, otherwise our lead scoring will have no foundation.

2. Use many variables to define a profile
Over time, you can add variables to define a good profile. However, it is advisable to limit the options a bit initially.

This way there will be less probability of error when determining the weight of each criterion.

3. Do not use negative ratings
Just as you use positive ratings, negative ones can also be quite helpful.

There are important characteristics that can take points away from a lead. For example, if a lead has not interacted with your page for several months, they are probably no longer interested in what you offer. Or if they have unsubscribed from your email list, that is also a negative signal, even if they have a positive score in the other criteria.

Therefore, you must also determine what criteria cause the lead to lose points.

4. Implement lead scoring and never optimize it again
Implementing lead scoring can be a lot of work, however, it is not enough to achieve the expected results.

You must constantly evaluate your strategy to optimize it according to its development. Only then will you be able to obtain convincing results that are truly worthwhile.

5. Not nurturing leads after evaluating them
Once you've evaluated your leads and classified them, you know that not all of them are ready to make a purchase. However, there are some who are very close to doing so.

You need to give them a little help. With the right push, you can get the result you want without having to make a big effort.

So, if you have already done the heavy lifting, do not forget this very important stage, which will be the one that will really give you the expected effects.

6. Not having help from automation
Automation can give you the help you need to bring your leads closer to the moment of purchase.

Therefore, you must choose the best alternative available to contribute to this task. This way, you will be able to develop your leads much more quickly.

After lead scoring, what should you do?
Once you have the evaluations established by the lead score, they will help you guide your conversion efforts, directing offers and communications to the different customer profiles mapped in the score.

This data, in addition to providing you with an initial diagnosis of the situation of your database, will help you understand the effectiveness of the techniques you are using and will use in the future. In other words, lead scoring offers you a thermometer that will help you understand the effectiveness of your actions and can even help you to improve them more and more.

Once you have the notes, you can divide your leads into four groups to work on them separately:

Interested and well-profiled leads : They are ready to be sent to the sales team.
Leads with a good profile, but not interested enough : Work on nurturing these leads before sending them to the sales team.
Leads who are very interested, but don't have a good profile : Don't waste a lot of energy on them.
Uninterested and poor-profile leads : You can leave them aside.
With this segmentation, you can implement a lead nurturing strategy to direct them toward your final objective, that is, the moment of purchase of the product or service you offer.

The first group is already ready to consume. The second needs you to focus all your efforts on converting it, since they are the ones with the highest probability of conversion. And the third can be nurtured without putting in too much effort.

The innovative role of interactivity in lead scoring
As we mentioned before, to identify the level of interest a lead has in your product or service you must evaluate the interactions they have had with your website.

However, measuring these interactions may not be as simple and accurate on some platforms.

In this situation, a solution emerges that, among many other advantages, facilitates the qualification of leads. Interactive web pages allow the collection of various data about the users who visit these domains.

It is possible, for example, to collect behavioral data and at the same time promote real-time segmentation, providing the visitor with content tailored to their expectations and needs.

This way, while providing the right nurturing, you can send insights about their behavior to your sales team.