Lead scoring is revolutionizing lead msanagement. Sales and marketing teams that take advantage of lead management close more deals and are more likely to reach out to the prospects that are most likely to respond favorably. How can you take advantage of the benefits of lead scoring software?
What is lead scoring software?
The best lead scoring software can save your sales team time. This kind of marketing automation can streamline the sales process for marketing teams, resulting in more qualified leads and improving the success of sales teams. Lead scoring software takes leads from all sorts of sources and analyzes them.
This process enables lead management that ranks leads from most likely to result in successful sales to least likely, enabling your sales team to nurture leads with the highest lead quality. Good lead scoring software also may recommend sales and marketing teams use a particular type of communication or marketing language to appeal to particular leads.
This kind of predictive lead scoring differs from traditional lead scoring or rules-based lead scoring, which assign numerical values based on information you have entered. Predictive lead scoring software relies on machine learning and algorithms to produce more effective lead management than traditional marketing automation software.
What does quality predictive lead scoring have to offer?
Different lead scoring software offers different lead scoring solutions, some of which are better than others. When determining the scoring system that will lead to the most sales opportunities for your team, it is important to consider the options available. Here are some things to look for:
- Lead generation—You want lead scoring that offers a lot of data points from prospects most likely to respond to your sales outreach.
- Manage leads—The lead scoring software you choose should give you the option to manage leads through a variety of channels like web forms and email, and keep leads stored in a database where you can easily access them.
- Lead qualification—You want to ensure that only the best leads make it through to the sales pipeline, at least at the top of the list, so you need software that can comb through various lead characteristics to result in the best leads for your teams.
- Based on a range of criteria—Look for a lead score derived from a wide variety of information, including professions, industry, geography, and more.
- Lead analysis—For a marketing automation platform to work well for your team, it needs to generate several different analysis tools and reports all in one tool to analyze the marketing process effectively.
- Integration—How well does the marketing automation software you choose work with other types of systems? The software will need to work with other marketing and sales CRM tools, including HubSpot CRM, Zoho CRM, and many others. Your lead scoring software needs to generate information from these sources and then allow your marketing and sales teams to access all the relevant information they need.
- Works on a sales cloud—Unless you have a very large business with plenty of space to host software, you will likely want lead scoring software that exists within a sales cloud. This cloud gives you access to multiple tools without needing to host hardware or resolve annoying CRM issues on your own.
Why choose predictive scoring over rules-based scoring?
Rules-based scoring was the new and exciting feature in the sales process portion of marketing automation only a few years ago, so why has predictive lead scoring software displaced it? There are a couple of key reasons you should switch your marketing qualified leads over to a predictive model: time and oversight.
Time
Before predictive lead scoring, marketing automation systems had to be programmed manually by team members inputting behavioral data and other relevant content. Needless to say, this process consumed a lot of time. The best lead scoring software uses machine learning to create an easy-to-use CRM that generates more helpful information using artificial intelligence while taking less time.
Oversight
Because the lead score can only be as good as the marketing database it is put into it, traditional lead scoring often had important oversights. If oversights were not resolved, it could cause disastrous ramifications, especially for teams that do not have the time or know-how to input information as effectively as necessary.
By contrast, predictive lead scoring software that uses machine learning to build lead management is more likely to use customer records and behavioral signals effectively to create more leads and choose the right leads to suggest to sales teams.
Choose the best lead scoring software for your needs
Lead scoring is an essential tool for your sales and marketing teams. If you are using an old-fashioned lead management form, it is time to switch over to predictive scoring. By choosing an easy-to-use CRM that relies on artificial intelligence to build highly effective predictive models, you can dramatically increase the effectiveness of your sales efforts.
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