Online media has turned the world of sales and marketing on its head. Today, many consumers actively dislike being sold to. Instead, they prefer to do their own research by following brands on social media, subscribing to email newsletters, reading blog posts, and scrutinizing user-generated reviews. This doesn’t mean the role of the sales professional is redundant. It does mean, however, sales professionals have to be able to identify the signals that someone is ready to buy. They then need to engage their prospects with the right offer at the right time or risk turning them away.
This change in consumer buying habits means businesses need to invest in two things:
Marketing Automation platforms like emfluence use a lead scoring system to identify these buying signals.
How Marketing Automation Uses Lead Scoring to Identify Buying Signals
Lead scoring is a system that identifies customer interest in a particular product or service. It does so by assigning a score to specific engagements. These engagements might include:
As a general rule of thumb, the quicker and higher a lead score increases, the greater the interest a prospect has in a product or service. But lead scoring works both ways.
Negative and Neutral Lead Scoring
You can assign a negative or neutral lead score to leads your marketing and sales teams might not be so keen to engage with immediately. These might include competitors, students using academic domains and accessing your content for research purposes, or generic email addresses like Gmail and Yahoo accounts which may hold little value to B2B marketers*.
In the case of competitors, you’ll almost certainly want to remove these people from your sales funnel as quickly as possible. Regarding everyone else, you may gently nurture those relationships until they either remove themselves from the sales funnel, drop out due to lack of activity (as part of your list hygiene regime), or identify themselves as more serious leads.
*Occasionally, scorching hot leads hide behind generic email addresses. It’s the marketer’s job to coax them out.
Nurture Campaigns
A nurture campaign is designed to keep people engaged with your brand until they are ready to become customers. Marketers running nurture campaigns understand two things:
Nurture campaigns can be triggered by lead score. For example, you might present low-scoring leads with a regular newsletter and an occasionally targeted campaign. Meanwhile, you can send higher-scoring prospects more frequent and detailed thought leadership campaigns and targeted offers designed to guide them further along the sales funnel.
5 Buying Signals You Should Never Ignore
There are several buying signals you should always pay attention to. These include:
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To learn more about how the marketing automation experts at emfluence can help you use lead scoring to identify buying signals (and yes, we’ll be scoring you), contact us today at .
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