Enterprises using lead scoring benefit from a 77% increase in lead generation ROI compared with organizations that don’t use lead scoring, according to research.
And implementing lead scoring is one of the most effective ways to improve sales.
To better identify sales-ready customers who should be prioritized for engagement, many businesses now employ lead scoring to effectively and efficiently measure prospects’ level of interest in the company and product/service fit. However, a simple lead-scoring solution is not enough. Marketers need a solution that enables companies to see the full picture—on the level of individual leads as well as accounts—to accurately pinpoint and select their target audiences and personalize campaigns to reach them.
RingCentral, a provider of Cloud-based communications and collaboration solutions for businesses, recognized it was missing out on many potentially valuable opportunities because leads weren’t being aligned to the right accounts with the right information. That meant, in turn, that sales and marketing activities weren’t aligned to be relevant to potential customers. To improve results and boost its pipeline, the company implemented an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy. Three core components of this strategy were as follows:
- Accurate lead-to-account matching
- Accurate and actionable account and lead insights
- Improved routing and prioritization of leads
The company found that more than 30% of inbound leads had missing or inaccurate data in key fields, such as company size (by number of employees). As a result, the leads couldn’t be automatically routed to the right sales team and were ignored. Equally troublesome from an ABM perspective: 20% of inbound leads couldn’t be matched to accounts. Company information was often missing or in a nonstandard format.
Do you have similar issues with your lead-scoring model? You can find out by ticking off the following checklist:
Yes[ ] No[ ] Do you have the right data—and is all the information accurate? You may have the most sophisticated lead-scoring model, but it won’t work without enough of the right data. That means looking beyond superficial insights (job titles, type of business, etc.) to more relevant info that actually tells you whether your lead is compatible to your offering (e.g., installed technologies).
That data needs to be constantly refreshed to avoid data degeneration (“decay” or inaccuracy) that stems from people’s changing jobs or titles and companies’ changing their status or situation.