If you’re using HubSpot's Sales Hub, you know it delivers everything you need for managing customer and prospect relationships (and much more). But have you taken advantage of HubSpot's Lead Scoring feature?
With a little bit of planning and setup time, you can use Lead Scoring to identify and prioritize your best prospects on an ongoing, real-time basis.
Lead Scoring is the process of ranking Contact or Company records in order of their potential to become your customer. The closer a Contact or Company is to the desirable standard you set, the higher they rank and the more likely they are to move on to the next stage of your selling process.
A Lead Scoring program also saves time and effort, as it helps sales reps to focus on the best leads. When they know who the warmest leads are, they can convert and close more deals. Otherwise, reps often feel they have a database full of leads with no distinction between them and no obvious place to start in terms of reaching out.
Ready to dive into HubSpot lead scoring? Here’s what you need to know.
When you have many prospects at your fingertips, defining your buyer persona and understanding the characteristics that make a buyer a good fit for your business can be helpful. Drawing up an Ideal Client/Customer Profile (ICP) and gauging customer profiles against them equips you with what to look for in a company or contact before you start directing your sales and marketing efforts toward them.
Common parameters of ICP typically include a company’s industry, revenue, employee count, ownership structure (private, public, government, etc.), current technology, the scale of operations, etc.
Like any of its features, HubSpot offers ease in lead score creation. It takes three simple steps before you are all set!
You can decide what a deal maker or breaker between you and a bunch of leads is by setting up positive and negative criteria for your contacts. The higher a contact ranks in terms of positive criteria, the better its profile and the higher the chances it will purchase your product or services. The higher a contact ranks on the negative criteria, the less likely they are to purchase your products and services. It's that simple.
You can define your contact criteria by judging your ICP, which in turn will be ascertained by consulting with experienced sales reps and existing clients, conducting surveys, and so on. Additionally, you can model your criteria after you segment clients, say, on the basis of firmographic or geographical segmentation and, equally important, their engagement with you. You can also insert and edit the number of contact criteria.
Every company’s scoring system differs. Some may keep a point scale of 10, others a point scale of 100. You can choose a score by which points get added to the positive attributes when contact is close to the ICP or, conversely, points get added to the negative attributes. While HubSpot provides default score properties for your ease, you can customize it per your needs.
In the previous two steps, a basic workflow gets set up in HubSpot to use its lead-scoring system. Now let us understand how to implement it.
There are key metrics that will help you effectively score your leads. These metrics give insight into the most common conversion-prone lead types and how you can adjust your campaigns to win them.
Keep track of the sources that account for the largest or even lowest share of hot leads. This is important to tap into healthy sources, be more involved with them, and reach out to a broader audience through these means. You must also look into the low-yielding sources and re-strategize to make them favorable too.
The buyer journey reflects the buyer behavior of people. By means of data and analytics, you can keep track of whether a contact will convert. By doing so, you can deliver a more personalized experience in line with buyer behavior, reevaluate strategies, and attempt to make your products and services more successful.
In a B2B transaction, scoring a lead based on a company’s size, revenue, ownership structure, employee count, etc. will give you a broad idea of which ones will most likely convert (or not). Businesses that do not score well on firmographics will be weeded out, directing sales reps to focus on the best prospects.
How many companies visit your social media page? What percent of them sign up for your free trials? How many contacts open and/or click on your sales or marketing emails? All such considerations are crucial to factor in the engagement of a contact with you. A contact investing and engaging with you is a green flag with high potency for conversion.
In addition to HubSpot's standard Lead Scoring feature, Professional and Enterprise users have the option of a Custom Lead Scoring program. If you need help planning and implementing a Lead Scoring program, please contact us.