Lead Scoring: Marketing’s Best Assist for Sales’ Prospecting
Continuing the breakdown of Hubspot’s incredible data from their 2017 State of Inbound Marketing report, I am focusing on how marketers can make the most out of their efforts by empowering their sales departments. In my previous posts, I examined email marketing, inbound marketing, and smarketing, but today, I will shine the spotlight on our friends in sales.
Marketing and Sales are the 1-2 punch that generates the customer lifeblood for all companies. Great marketing without a solid sales team will undoubtedly lead to a number of lost leads. On the flip side, mediocre marketing team with all-star sales reps creates frustration due to wasted resources. In a successful company, however, marketers are the John Stockton to sales’ Karl Malone (non-sports translation: an incredible partnership).
According to the State of Inbound report, nearly 38% of sales reps state that their biggest challenge is prospecting, which to many of us is nothing new. Prospecting has been the biggest struggle for sales reps 3 years running in this report. If prospecting is the biggest issue, what is the solution?
According to the State of Inbound report, the best way to make the most of your prospects is to take them through a buyer’s journey that is driven by lead scoring. Just as it is typically easier to beat a team that you have studied versus one you have not, it is easier for a sales rep to convert a prospect that they know is knowledgeable and informed over a cold call or a disengaged contact.
SmartAcre’s Melissa Day has previously discussed lead scoring and lead grading in detail, which I highly recommend reviewing. In layman’s terms, lead scoring gives values to various actions that prospects take from your marketing efforts, such as clicking on an email or viewing a whitepaper. Each action is given a point value, and once a lead reaches a point threshold, they are qualified to move through to the next step of the buyer’s journey. Once they reach sales qualified lead status, it’s finally time to put in the closer: your awesome salesperson.
Does this sound like something your team would benefit from? If you think that lead grading and lead scoring could be a valuable addition to your marketing efforts, we want to strategize with you!