Lead generation and scoring are rapidly becoming more of a science than an art. Past marketing and sales models have relied on a lot of first impressions and hunches, especially because there weren’t tools to find patterns in aggregated data. If your company is still using older models and ways of analyzing data, you might be mis-categorizing your leads. Here’s how:
1. Manually created scoring models take several revisions.
Every industry’s leads act differently. Even different companies within the same industry sell to wildly different customer personas because each service offering is tailored to a different market or highlights different strengths. That means even an experienced marketer will need to take time to develop a model that’s more than guesswork. All of the months your salespeople will spend on leads that weren’t as ripe as they thought are months of wasted time and effort, which means fewer sales.
2. Collecting data for a lead score could make you miss the sales opportunity.
Time spent on weak leads isn’t the only time wasted by a manual lead scoring model. In order to score a new lead, someone has to spend time plugging in their demographic information, purchasing behavior, and other scoring factors. Collecting all of that information takes time. If your sales department has to prioritize leads based on their score but there’s a lag between a consumer entering the sales pipeline and the score being finalized, that customer may have been snapped up by a competitor.
3. You can only find the trends you can think of.
Good score models consider lots of different factors. They don’t just look at age, past purchases, or, for business to business companies, the industry. Everything from the time of day they look at your website to the type of device they use can impact their overall score and likelihood of making a purchase.
Manual lead scoring models are much better than guessing which leads your salespeople should focus on, but there’s a lot of room for improvement. Modern tools like predictive models, artificial intelligence, and third-party companies that focus exclusively on data can cut down on lost time or bad models. Go to Predictive Response to see how changing your lead strategies can get you more customers.