The qualification of potential clients is a methodology used by commercial departments to determine the value of potential customers. This is done by assigning values to them based on their behavior in relation to the interest in products or services.
Your company needs to attract more customers, but this is not about the quantity of customers. You should focus, instead, on the quality of data your company gathers, given that for commercial departments, a long list of contacts is useless if they can´t be envisioned and eventually converted into final consumers.
For your commercial departments to identify potential clients, you must establish a lead generation process and customer evaluation processes that guarantee the highest sales assertiveness.
That is precisely why you need to take advantage of Lead Scoring.
How Can Lead Scoring Help You Get More Clients?
The Lead Scoring process helps you determine the level of interest that a commercial opportunity generated through your channels has towards our products or services. It also allows companies to assess if that opportunity is relevant to them. It is about coming up with a score to determine the conversion potential of a contact.
Architecture of a Lead Scoring System
The first thing you must understand for an accurate qualification of opportunities are the steps of the buyer, which are:
- Awareness: At this stage you must create awareness of the products and services offered by your company, so that the client can begin to understand what your company does and how it does it.
- Consideration: In this stage the buyers will continue their investigation, and this is where Lead Scoring becomes key. This is where you start the automatization of the marketing process to understand better your customers and make a specific follow-up of their topic of interest. (This is how you “bull’s eye target “ your client to get to the decision stage).
- Decision: In this stage, the consumer is ready to select a supplier and make a purchase. When they reach this point what they are most interested in is your level of execution and customer service.
Secondly, you must create the necessary content for each stage of your company's sales cycle. For instance: If your customer is at the Awareness stage, you should create content that will grab this possible new customer's attention. Blogs, videos and e-books are all good sources at this stage.
In the decision stage, for example, it will be necessary to make a comparison of our product with that of our competition, aiming to gain competitive advantage and do free trials if necessary.
Make sure you create enough quality content for each of these stages.
Finally, automate the processes of the buyer and the sales processes of the company in a Sales crm that allows you to automate the Lead Scoring process from the begging to the end .
What are the Lead Scoring models that you should consider for the business processes of your company?
Here you have five different customer scoring models based on the type of data you can collect from the people involved in your business:
1. Demographic informationAsk demographic questions on the forms on your landing pages and can use your potential customers' answers to see how well they fit your target audience.
For example, if you only sell to a certain geographic location, you can give a negative score to any lead outside the city, state, zip code, corresponding country, and so on.
2. Company informationIf you are an industry that sells to companies and not necessarily to the end customers, define what kind of organizations you are interested in selling to, what size they are, in what type of industry, among other variables that may be important to your company.
3. Online behavior
Review the interaction your potential customers have with their digital channels. Here, it's important to identify what information they downloaded and from what pages, the type of content they searched for, and other sources of information.
4. Email
If someone chose to receive emails, the open and click rates could tell us a lot about that potential customers and you can focus on those who seem most engaged. You can also give a higher score to potential customers who click on high-value emails, such as demo offers.
5. Social commitment
How many times did customers clicked on your company's Tweets and Facebook posts? How many times did they retweet or share these messages? If your target buyers are active on social media, then you might consider awarding points to potential customers with certain scores.
Finally, it is important to note that in order for a good system to get more customers, it must adapt to the circumstances and behavior of the leads. It is essential to review the scoring system periodically to verify that it is still eligible to qualify potential customers.