Engaging with prospects is a part of many business activities. However, the more leads your sales representatives manage to create, the more scrupulous they need to be when dealing with them.

Prioritization on who your reps should contact first and who not to contact at all should take place. And let’s forget about years of experience and your gut instincts. They are not enough.

Read this article to learn more about the lead scoring model and some of the most effective examples.

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is the process of ranking how sales-ready your prospects are using one of the methods.

Often, the score-determining process includes the following steps:

1. You choose which criteria best indicate how sales-ready is your prospective client.

2. For each of the selected criteria, you assign specific point values.

3. You calculate the final value for a prospect and act accordingly.

So this brings us to lead scoring models to consider when implementing them into your system.

Things To Expect From a Lead Scoring Model

Here are five factors that all decent scoring models have in common:

A Threshold

A lead is assigned specific scoring that indicates that they are sales-ready. Thus, when a prospect accumulates a specified value, it becomes ready to get moved from the marketing to the sales department.

Explicit Scoring

A lead gets scores for having specific qualities, such as role, company size, job title, geographic location, etc.

Implicit Scoring

Such scoring is based on your prospects’ behavior, such as joining a webinar, watching a video, free trials, newsletter form submissions, etc.

Negative Scoring

You should be aware that there can be negative scoring, and your potential clients can take steps back in the sales funnel.

If so, you’ll need to take scores away from your prospects. Some of the reasons can include unsubscribing from an email, users who do the competitor research, affiliate program visitors, i.e., who those are not your target audience and will unlikely convert.

Reconsideration

The digital world evolves instantly, and so do your prospects. Develop a habit of reviewing your model every several weeks or months. Connect with the marketing team to collect new details about your customer base.

Besides, run your analysis, and if some type of persona starts behaving more actively, adjust their score accordingly.

Lead Score Calculation

Every business is unique and can score prospects differently. However, many choose to use a scale from 1 to 100.

Furthermore, the number of scores a lead gets can be influenced by internal data a company could have collected over the years of operation. Thus, some factors can rank higher or lower depending on the business you are working for.

For example,

Company A uses LinkedIn for lead nurturing. When running LinkedIn automated outreach using Linked Helper, they found out that prospects whose last five posts the system liked and whose skills were endorsed are 30% more likely to engage with their InMail messages, reply to sales reps’ outreach, and convert.

So the company has built a corresponding scenario and ranks such prospects’ engagement higher.

Examples of Lead Scoring Models

The selection of a model depends entirely on your business niche, customer base, product or services you are offering, etc. That’s why it is not something you can borrow or copy from some other business.

Here are some ideas you could use for your future model:

Activity Scoring

This model does not involve assigning numbered scores to the leads. Instead, any prospect with specific points on the profile can be a good fit for the company out-of-the-box, especially if they are active on the business’s website.

Website Interaction Scoring

This is one of the most popular models that is based on how prospects interact with specific site pages. They can be website browsing activities, newsletter subscriptions, adding vendibles to the cart, or visiting the About page.

Email Engagement Scoring

Emails are an essential part of lead nurturing and lead generation campaigns. Such scoring may include click-through on a product, promotion, or other campaign-specific CTA. It can be giving points for opening an email and extracting them for not interacting with five or more drip emails.

B2B Scoring

In B2B lead nurturing, connecting to the right person is a game-changer. No matter what a perfect match a business could be, If you are connecting with the wrong person, it will ruin the campaign.

Here, you can add a specific number of points depending on how many employees a business has, which department a prospect represents, and what job position they have.

Wrapping Up

When prospecting, lead scoring helps improve the effectiveness of your sales reps’ activities.

Focusing on prospects that score the best allows you to increase conversion by engaging with leads who are ready.

More details on LinkedIn marketing https://www.linkedhelper.com/blog/