Admit it — a good chunk of your leads never convert into sales.

But they do eat up your sales team’s time. ⏱️

So what if you could figure out which leads would actually convert and stop wasting time on a bad lead that won’t?

Nope, we don’t mean hiring a psychic to do the job for you. 

Say hola to Lead Scoring! 👋

In this article, we’ll discover the key benefits of lead scoring and share some best practices (including an awesome tool) to up the ante of your lead scoring process.

But that’s not all. 

We’ll also cover some lead scoring basics in an FAQ section in case you’re wondering what the fuss is all about.  

Let’s find out if you’ll use lead scoring in the future! 🔮

Five Proven Benefits of Lead Scoring 

We’re going to assume you already know what lead scoring is and how it works. But if you don’t, hop over to the FAQ section for an explanation. 

If you just want to know the benefits of lead scoring, here they are:

1. Higher Conversion Rates

In the most basic form, lead scoring allows your sales and marketing teams to focus on high-quality prospects. 

How?

Let’s say you walk into a store to scan through the collection. But the salesperson bombards you with options and pressurizes you to buy the stuff you’re not even sure you need.

‍Not the most comfortable shopping experience, right? 

The same applies to online sales — and that’s where lead scoring pops in. 

A lead score helps you assess a prospect’s readiness — that’s if a lead is ready to have a conversation or if they’re still in the research phase and require additional nurturing. 

As a result, your team can avoid annoying (or downright scaring away 😨) a prospect or missing out on an opportunity. 

How can you actually use this?

When you can identify the right leads and use marketing automation to engage with them at the right time in their customer journey, they’ll hear you out, and you’ll improve your conversion rate invariably. 

2. Increased Sales Efficiency

Here’s the deal.

Knowing which hot lead you need to reach out to means your sales reps won’t have to waste time waiting for a response or chasing down any bad lead. 

So, if your sales reps are always stuck in this phase…

With lead scoring as a part of marketing automation, they can strike the iron while it’s hot by offering better customer experience at different stages of the customer journey and converting leads sooner. 

The result — you achieve a shorter sales cycle and improve your sales efficiency. 👏

But that’s not all.

When your sales efficiency improves, you can do more with small and leaner sales teams. This can help companies cut down on their customer acquisition costs. But more importantly, it can be a game changer for smaller businesses or companies just starting out. 🙌

3. More Effective Marketing Campaigns 

We know it can take a lot of work for a business to generate marketing qualified leads.

It requires thoughtful inbound marketing and exceptional customer experience to get the prospects interested. 

Guess what?

A lead scoring system can be your team’s right hand in identifying the marketing efforts and channels that bring in the ideal customer that would convert.

No kidding!

Let’s say your social media campaign generates 100 leads per month, but according to the lead score, only 20 of them have the potential to convert. On the other hand, paid ads bring in 60 leads, but all of them would likely convert into customers. 

You now know which marketing campaign or channel to bet your money on. 💰

You can then tailor your campaigns or use marketing automation to generate more qualified leads through these channels. 

There’s nothing more to it, or maybe there is a little…

Wait. There’s more. 

Did you know the lead scoring process can also help you with lead nurturing?

That’s right. 

By identifying where your prospect is in the sales funnel, you can use a targeted marketing campaign that’s most relevant to them. This can go a long way in building trust amongst your customers.

And once they trust you, they’ll likely buy from you. 

4. Better Sales and Marketing Alignment

When it comes to lead generation, there’s often a tiff between sales and marketing as to which one brings in better prospects. 

Lead scoring can settle this for good. 💯

With a lead scoring process, you can have a rule set that defines an ideal sales-ready prospect for your company. Every potential customer the marketing team passes onto the sales team should qualify these rules. 

The best part? 

Both the sales and marketing teams can sit together to define these sets of rules, facilitating better sales and marketing alignment. 

This way, the marketing team can create targeted marketing campaigns for the ideal prospects and hand over hot leads to the sales department to nurture and convert. 

You can heave a sigh of relief cause…

5. Measurable Return on Investment (ROI) on Lead Generation Efforts 

Implementing a lead scoring system gives you tangible bottom-line benefits. 

Why?

When your sales team targets a prioritized lead, chances are that the potential customer will convert. 

And, more time spent on prioritized leads = higher returns on time invested. 

In fact, you'll be surprised to know that companies using lead scoring experience a whopping 77% increase in lead generation ROI!

Before you go like….

Know that it’s just the tip of the iceberg. ⛰️

When you can measure the ROI of your lead generation efforts, you can allocate your resources better. As a result, your sales and marketing efforts would also be more aligned with your company’s key goals. This means your business and all your departments can flourish. 

Now you know the perks of having a lead scoring system in your organization. 

But following a few lead scoring best practices can turn the game in your favor. Let’s check out what these best practices are. 

Four Effective Lead Scoring Best Practices

Here are four tactics to help you make the best of your lead scoring process:

1. Know When to Use Lead Scoring

Sure, a lead scoring system is a powerful tool and any B2C or B2B marketing team can use it to identify high quality leads.

But if you’re a B2B business that only gets a few leads per day and your sales goals are met by closing three or fewer deals per month, B2B lead scoring won’t add much value. 

Whereas, when your team has too many leads to chase and nurture, every sales rep feels like this…

Take the hint. 

Set up a lead scoring model ASAP😰

Or you can simply get them a smart headless sales AI like Toplyne that’ll do half the job for them. 😉

And even if establishing a lead scoring system might seem like an arduous task right now, trust us and take the plunge. 

Your entire organization will thank you for it. 😇

2. Ensure Continual Maintenance to Stay Relevant

An intelligent way to assess if your lead scoring system is paying off is by conducting regular audits. 

How does this help?

You’ll be able to assess if the prospects meeting your lead qualification criterion or buyer persona also meet your company’s lead quality expectations.

Fact check: Your ideal customer must also bring in the expected money. 

One way of doing that is to review and compare conversion rates from one sales cycle to another. If the rates are way below your expected range, you should revise your lead scoring criteria. 

3. Establish a Point Decay Rate

Lead scoring helps create a point value system to move a prospect forward ➡️ in your sales pipeline. 

But, like it or not, some leads will sit in your sales funnel and won’t take any action!

Pretty much like someone sitting on a treadmill. 

Moreover, the longer they take to perform any action, the less likely they will buy from you.

Solution?

While implementing a lead scoring model, you should factor in unqualified lead criteria through a point decay rate — remove points for inaction. 

For example, deduct 10 points for 30 days of free trial inactivity, 15 points for 60 days, 20 for 90 days, and so on.

Likewise, factor in the actions you don’t want your leads to take. This could include unsubscribing from your nurturing campaign, filling out your career page form, etc. 

But there’s a catch!

B2B marketing teams should account for longer durations of inactivity before a lead gets a deduction. This is primarily because several stakeholders are involved in B2B sales. So adjust your point value for an unqualified lead accordingly. 

4. Use Toplyne For To Spot Right Leads Automatically 

It’s simple, the more comprehensive your data is for your lead scoring system, the more accurate your predictions will be. But evaluating hundreds of product usage data points manually is unrealistic for most SaaS companies. 

What if there was a way to implement automated lead scoring fast and well?

Enter Toplyne!

Toplyne is the behavioral lead scoring platform Canva & Vercel use to generate sales pipeline from their self-serve funnel.

How?

It is a plug-and-play headless platform that you can easily integrate with your existing sales tech stack. Toplyne sits between your product usage tools (Amplitude, Mixpanel, Rudderstack) and CRM systems (Salesforce, Hubspot, etc.) to help you identify and target the right product-qualified leads. 

You can then use this one-of-a-kind tool to deploy various go-to-market (GTM) strategies that not only help increase your win rate but also allow you to leverage existing pipelines for cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Here’s how this tool helps you: 

Here’s how companies like Canva and Vercel generate sales pipeline from their self-serve funnel using Toplyne:

• Step 1/7: Create monetization playbooks to surface conversion and expansion opportunities (leads most likely to convert to paying customers, and teams most likely to grow into larger teams)

• Step 2/7: Choose the right leads to target – users (individual users) or accounts (a group of users with an organization).

• Step 3/7: Select the frequency at which you would want leads synced in your GTM apps.

• Step 4/7: Define how many leads you want by either the number of leads or your expected win rate, depending on your sales capacity and GTM strategy.

• Step 5/7: Build custom segments - Build custom segments based on And/Or logic at the deepest level of sub-properties within your product analytics.

• Step 6/7: Validate your GTM strategy - Hold back some users as a control group to test your GTM strategy.

• Step 7/7: Sync your product qualified pipeline into your GTM destinations - CRMs, sales & marketing execution tools, and customer engagement platforms.

Now you know how you can target high quality leads using Toplyne instead of a lead scoring tool. Let’s answer some questions about lead scoring next. 

Three FAQs on Lead Scoring

Here are answers to some basic lead scoring questions: 

1. What Is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is a way to identify the most promising prospects in your sales funnel quickly. 

How?

Under the traditional lead scoring process, you assign values (often numerical) to each lead that your team generates.

These values are assigned based on different criteria or data points such as location, pricing page views, inviting a team member to use the app, etc. Each criterion or data point has a specific corresponding value. When you add up every data point, you get a final lead score. 

Likewise, for account based marketing, the lead scoring should focus on companies that match the lead scoring criteria. 

The higher the lead score, the better the chances of that prospect converting into a paying customer. 

This way, when you go after the high scoring leads, you hit them…

2. What is a Lead Scoring Model? 

A lead scoring model is a system to calculate a lead score. There are different systems or lead scoring models for evaluating a lead score, such as: 

• Product Usage Lead Scoring Model: The product usage model looks at in-app actions like what features a free trial user used and how frequently, if they invited a team member to collaborate, and more. This model helps you identify product qualified leads. Some companies may also use predictive scoring tools to identify such leads automatically. 

Note: Predictive scoring uses machine learning algorithms on your in-app data to identify high-intent leads. 

• Webpage Visitors Lead Scoring Model: Identifying leads based on people who visit your website or content and what parts of your site (the pricing page) they interact with and how.

• Interaction Lead Scoring Model: Identifying prospects based on a profile that makes them a right fit for your company. These prospects should have also interacted heavily with your website. 

• Business-to-Business Lead Scoring Model: A B2B lead scoring model targets specific work titles, departments, and business types. Scores are also added based on the number of employees or team size.

• Email Interaction Lead Scoring Model: Companies that use email marketing campaigns can use these types of lead scoring models to calculate scores based on email open rates, number of click-throughs, people who haven’t responded to numerous emails, and more. 

3. Why Should SaaS Companies Score their Leads? 

While traditional lead scoring can benefit any company in any industry, it particularly helps SaaS companies in three ways: 

• Lead scoring can help you zero down on freemium or trial users who are most likely to convert into paying customers.🔎

• It helps you evaluate leads’ characteristics (like company size, online usage, etc.) to establish which plan suits them best. 

• A lead score will help a sales rep determine when a lead is ready to start discussing a plan upgrade (like when a lead’s team size is bigger for the plan they’re currently researching.)

Bottom line?

With lead scoring, you’ll know who your biggest opportunities are, the size of each sale opportunity, and which opportunity to prioritize.  And by using a lead scoring software, you can use your team’s time and efforts wisely!

Predict the Future of Your Leads with Toplyne! 

Lead scoring is a great tool that can help you reach out to the right leads — at the right time.

It begins with your sales and marketing teams collaborating to decide on an ideal lead profile for your company. These teams can then nurture or convert them accordingly. 

But if you wish to take this process up a notch using artificial intelligence and predictive analytics — use a headless sales AI like Toplyne. 

With Toplyne, you can identify high-intent pipelines right in your existing GTM apps and target the right buyer persona for higher win rates and expansion opportunities. 

Why leave it to fate when you can take control of your lead conversion by signing up for Toplyne for free today?