Lead scoring is revolutionizing lead management. 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. This process enables your sales team to nurture leads that have 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 that 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 that 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 they can easily be accessed.
- 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.
- Predictive lead scoring is 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 much more. Your lead scoring software needs to generate information from these sources and then allow your marketing and sales teams to access all of 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 enables 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 for that being the case and to switch your marketing qualified leads over to a predictive model:
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 consumed a lot of time. The best lead scoring software utilizes machine learning to create a very easy-to-use CRM that generates more helpful information using artificial intelligence while taking less time.
Oversight
Since the lead score can only be as good as the marketing database that is put into it, traditional lead scoring often had important oversights. Disastrous ramifications could result if oversights were not resolved, 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 utilizes machine learning to build lead management is more likely to use customer records effectively 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.
Popular lead scoring software like that from Marketo (acquired by Adobe), Eloqua (acquired by Oracle), Salesforce Marketing Cloud, etc., can truly enhance your business’ bottom line, but what’s the overall best option? Using collaborative software like Stensul simplifies the email creation process, for starters. By creating more effective emails faster, you’ll reduce back-and-forth and see the results of a/b tests and other optimizations more often. Locked into a large MAP vendor platform? No problem. Stensul allows you to create emails 90% faster by creating Marketo-ready emails with a native integration.
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