What can Eurovision teach us about B2B lead scoring?
Saturday night sees the return of Eurovision to our screens for yet another year – an event which pitches countries against each other in a singing contest, yet ultimately ends up televising a bearded lady and a Finnish heavy metal band. But, like a puppet on a string, we’ll all be in front of our TVs come Saturday night, ready to see what this year’s extravaganza is going to delight our senses with.
Given that the event sees contestants awarded points by other nations based on their performance, it got us thinking about how we award points to our B2B marketing leads, based on their activities. Lead scoring is not a new idea. It’s something that all B2B marketers should be using in some form or another; but the success of the tool is to be found in the way the points are distributed. In Eurovision, it’s based on the quality of the act (or some might say the country’s political relationship with another), but in marketing it’s slightly different.
Offering points to every lead that downloads a piece of content or visits your website even once is a sure-fire way to end up with a list of leads that all have huge numbers of points, but are ultimately unqualified. The fact is, lead scoring is about using points to pre-qualify leads and ultimately highlighting your warmest and most suitable leads. For example, asking leads to provide information on their location via a landing page question, and then giving more points to those that are within your ideal country or chosen city is a great way to use lead scoring. It means those with the highest points are the ones most suitable to your salespeople’s hot lead criteria.
Lead scoring is a great tool when it comes to making your mind up about hot leads. By setting the correct lead scoring criteria in your marketing automation software you are able to sit back and let the system do the work. All you have to do is ensure that the system notifies you when a lead reaches the target score and boom bang-a-bang; you’ve got yourself a hot lead.
Speak to your sales team to find out exactly what they look for in a hot lead; use your landing page questions to qualify the leads (in accordance with this criteria); then use the marketing automation software to provide more points to the leads that provide the ‘right’ answers. Whether it’s location, industry, buying authority, or any other key factors; by using the right lead scoring criteria and points distribution, you can set the automation system, pour yourself a glass of bucks fizz and let the hot leads come to you. Ok, there’s slightly more to it than that, but with in-depth criteria from sales, comprehensive marketing automation software, and a targeted lead nurturing process in place, lead scoring greatly improves the quality of your leads… in a fraction of the time.
Every B2B marketer should have at least some lead nurturing programme in place, but if you’d like to find out more about converting leads to sales, simply…
