Lead scoring: the key to streamlining sales and marketing

How do you make sure you make the most of your hard-earned, carefully-researched B2B leads?

Once you’ve found your target audience and produced some promising leads, your next challenge is to decide which leads you need to prioritize - that is, which have the highest potential to convert into paying customers, and to do so in the near future.

This is where lead scoring comes into play. In this blog, we'll explain the significance of lead scoring, explore its benefits, provide examples of effective scoring criteria, and offer insights into building a robust system that will enhance your pipeline efficiency and ensure no leads slip through the net.

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What is lead scoring?

At its core, lead scoring is the process of evaluating and ranking leads based on their likelihood to become customers. It involves assigning quantitative values to specific criteria, activities, or data points that indicate a lead's sales-readiness. 

Things you’ll consider when lead scoring could include how well the prospect fits your Ideal Customer Profile, whether they’re currently in the market for a solution like yours, or whether they’ve already shown some interest in your brand.

By analyzing both demographic and behavioral information, you can develop a holistic understanding of your leads and prioritize them accordingly. Building a lead scoring system takes a little time and effort to refine, but once in place, it makes your pipeline flow more productively and consistently.

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Explicit lead scoring

Explicit lead scoring is based on data you’ve received from the lead directly. Demographic and firmographic data fall under this category and include attributes such as:

• Job title
• Company size
• Industry
• Location

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Implicit lead scoring

Implicit lead scoring involves paying attention to a lead’s behavior. It includes behavioral scoring, active, and passive buying behavior. Examples include:

• White paper or other gated content downloads
• Website visits
• Email engagement
• Watching product demos and videos
• Interactions in the sales and marketing funnel, such as attending a webinar

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The importance of B2B lead scoring for companies

Lead scoring helps you remove guesswork, enabling you to spend time on leads who are the most likely to convert. This process provides a clear understanding of how far your leads are down the sales funnel, helping you focus on the best actions to turn them into customers.

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4 essential benefits of B2B lead scoring for marketing and sales teams

1. Reduced marketing and acquisition expenses

Insights from lead scoring help tailor marketing strategies to attract and nurture qualified leads effectively, which helps reduce customer acquisition cost (CAC) and improve ROI on ads, lead magnets, and other campaigns.

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2. Increased conversion rates with less effort

When leads are properly prioritized, they’re more likely to receive prompt attention from the sales team, which does wonders to nurture trust and enhance chances of conversion. At the same time, sales reps can focus on delivering solutions to buyers who actually need them to close deals faster.

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3. Improved alignment between sales and marketing

Having better visibility over the quality of inbound and outbound leads means sales and marketing teams can make more informed campaign decisions to ensure they’re targeting the most qualified audiences.o customers.

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4. Boosted revenue

The sharper your lead scoring model, the more precisely you can identify ready-to-buy prospects and step in ahead of your competitors.

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A 5-step guide to effective B2B lead scoring

1. Align sales and marketing data

To understand which leads have a higher probability to close, analyze traits and behaviors of leads that have already converted. 

Before you start building your lead scoring system, you’ll need to have a clear understanding of your Ideal Customer Profile and your buyer personas. It’s crucial that both marketing and sales are aligned on these definitions!

To recap:

• Your Ideal Customer Profile is a detailed description of the company or an entity your solution is designed to help. The ICP focuses on relevant company attributes like industry, size, location, and market position. Your ICP describes ‘who’ your company should target in general.
• Buyer personas: These are the individuals within your target audience that you expect to engage with. You’ll most likely have multiple buyer personas to cover the various job titles, roles, responsibilities, levels of industry knowledge, and personal demographics of your buyers. It's about understanding the ‘whom’ within your ICP you’ll be talking to.

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2. Get feedback from your the sales team

The next step is to ask your sales team to fill in gaps in your research. Understand what interactions are valuable, how many touchpoints are needed before follow-up, and which pages on your website correlate to higher buyer intent.

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3. Choose the right lead scoring criteria

With your sales and marketing discussions complete, the next stage is to define all your scoring criteria. 

First, you’ll break down your Ideal Customer Profile and buyer personas and list all the relevant demographic criteria you’ve taken into account, such as:

• Company size
• Industry
• Job title and seniority
• Geographic location
• Etc.

You’ll then do the same for behavioral criteria or activities that indicate your leads are interested in buying your solution. This list could include:

• Email opens and clicks
• Website visits
• Content downloads
• Webinar registrations
• Social media engagements
• Form submissions
• Demo/trial requests
• Newsletter subscriptions
• Engaging with competitor content
• Etc.

With your criteria lists ready, it’s time to start scoring!

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4. Assigning criteria scores

For each of the criteria you listed above, you’ll now assign numerical values to rank leads from high to low on their suitability for your solution.

For example, let’s say you typically sell to companies with 500-1,000 employees, but junior or entry-level individuals don’t usually convert.

You might score companies with 500-1,000 employees with 50 points, but subtract 40 points if an inbound lead is in an entry-level role. (Your precise values will be scaled according to the general probability of conversion).

Similarly, you might notice that specific behaviors tend to correlate more or less strongly with deal closures. You might score webinar registrations with 50 points for strong conversion potential, but just 10 points for a content download.

You’ll notice that the first example includes negative scoring. When calibrated correctly, this will help prevent you wasting time on unqualified personas within your target audience, meaning you’re only reaching out to people with qualified purchasing power or real interest in closing a deal.

Finally, you’ll want to factor in the age of your leads and whether or not their interest in your solution was recent enough to be relevant. New interest leads are more likely to be in the market to buy right now, so you might consider removing points from leads who have sat dormant in your CRM for some time.

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Lead scoring examples in action

Here are some simplified examples of lead scoring in action:

• Ideal industry: + 40
• Non-manager/founder/C-level role: - 15
• Submitted form with personal Gmail address: - 10

Low priority lead: 15 points

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• Ideal industry: + 40
• Newsletter subscriber: +10
• Hasn’t opened last 5 newsletters: -10

Medium priority lead: 40 points

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• Ideal industry: + 40
• Founder role: +25
• Webinar registrant: +15

High priority lead: 80 points

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5. Continuous improvement is key!

Regularly review and tweak your lead scoring model based on feedback from your sales team. You always need to ensure that point values are accurate and are a true reflection of your deal flows.

Remember that the way prospects typically interact with your content can change over time, so it’s important you don’t keep your scoring set in stone. An inaccurate or outdated scoring system will lead to your sales reps wasting valuable time on leads that turn out to be unqualified!

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3 advanced lead scoring signal plays

1. Social impact

Identify well-known prospects with a large following on social media. Prioritize reaching out to them to gain endorsements and detailed reviews!

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2. Urgency assessment

Increase in website visit frequency is often a good indicator that a lead is ready to buy. Try incorporating this into your lead scoring model to boost conversions!

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3. Spam and negative score identification

Not every lead is worth your time! 

You can identify actions and characteristics indicating a lead isn’t worth pursuing and assign negative points to these. This will help you balance conflicting signals and keep your reps focused on top opportunities.

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Lead scoring best practices

Building a lead scoring system from scratch can be daunting. 

The key is to make sure you follow your data - historical sales and marketing data, industry data, and everything you know about your Ideal Customer Profile - to calibrate your lead scores.

Here are some best practices to help you build a meaningful lead scoring model that brings you the results you want:

• Gather insights from your sales team and customers: Leverage insights from sales reps and existing customers to identify key indicators of sales readiness. What triggers tend to make people want to buy? Who are the typical decision-makers in your target accounts?
• Check your marketing data too: Take a closer look at typical buyer journeys to see how they discover and start engaging with your brand. Where is your most qualified traffic coming from?
• Set a threshold for sales qualified leads (SQLs): Use your historical data and analysis to establish clear thresholds for lead scores indicating sales readiness. You can test whether your scoring makes sense by running your existing or recently-converted customers through your lead-scoring system!
• Leverage analytics and automation tools: If you have the option, you might look for integrated marketing or sales tools that automate parts of the lead scoring process for you. These will update leads in your CRM according to the scores you assign to website visits, email opens, clicks, etc. Bear in mind that these are very helpful for keeping your lead scoring consistent, but you’ll still need to determine and input the scoring framework yourself.
• Stay aligned: Lead scoring should always be a collaborative process between sales and marketing! Keep reviewing and revising your framework together to make sure both teams are targeting relevant leads and identifying any promising patterns.

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Focus on ready-to-buy leads with effective B2B lead scoring

Lead scoring is invaluable when it comes to prioritizing your B2B sales and marketing efforts. But building a robust and reliable lead qualification framework starts with having data and prospect insights you can rely on. 

Amplemarket allows teams to find their target audience with pinpoint accuracy and filter out their most qualified leads with expert precision. Reps can even identify individual prospects who are scoping out competitor solutions in real-time so they can time their outreach to perfection. Sign up for a demo to see how easy it is to find your top-scoring prospects in record time!

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FAQS on B2B lead scoring

What is lead scoring in B2B?

Lead scoring in B2B is a methodology used by marketing and sales teams to evaluate and rank leads based on their likelihood to become customers. This process involves assigning scores to various attributes and behaviors of leads, helping teams prioritize those with the highest potential to convert.

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How is a lead score calculated?

A lead score is calculated by assigning numerical values to explicit and implicit attributes of leads. Explicit attributes include demographic and firmographic data, such as job title and company size. Implicit attributes involve behavioral data, such as website visits and email engagement. Each attribute is given a score, and the sum of these scores determines the lead's overall score.

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What is KPI lead scoring?

KPI lead scoring refers to using key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate and rank leads. KPIs are specific metrics that indicate the success of a business process. In lead scoring, KPIs might include the number of website visits, email open rates, or content downloads, which help determine a lead's engagement and readiness to buy.

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What is the difference between lead grading and lead scoring?

Lead grading evaluates the quality of a lead based on demographic and firmographic attributes, such as company size and job title. It focuses on how well a lead fits the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Lead scoring, on the other hand, considers both the quality and behavior of leads, including their interactions with your brand, to assess their readiness to buy. Lead scoring combines lead grading with behavioral analysis to provide a comprehensive view of lead potential.