Automated lead scoring to auto-prioritize for success in 2024 

According to McKinsey, you can automate 50% of your work in today’s era.

So, how about setting your lead scoring models on auto-pilot?

As 56% of companies extensively use lead scoring to prioritize leads.

It is beneficial to implement lead scoring automation. It is a marketing automation-driven concept to prioritize the best leads that your sales team must act on. 

This blog will give you some insider insights on how lead scoring automation is a weapon to skyrocket your business. 

Let’s dive deep in. 

What is automated lead scoring? 

Automated lead scoring sets up a system to assess and prioritize the generated leads by scoring them with some points, which indicates their likeliness to be a potential customer.

It scores leads based on their real-time engagement activities on your website, which reveals their buying intent level.  

Such activities include newsletter sign-ups, pricing page visits, signing up for a free trial, taking a demo, and many more. 

Along with engagement, also consider demographic attributes (job title, job function, industry, company size, location, etc.) to qualify them for the sales team better. 

But you must have an efficient lead scoring model to set up for automation.

Once you’ve created a lead scoring model, you’ll be well on your way to capitalizing and taking the guesswork out of prioritizing your leads. 

Why is automated lead scoring important? 

Do you know? 68% of leading marketers consider lead scoring as a top revenue contributor. So, by automating your lead scoring, you can make your revenue contributor more powerful.

Boost your work efficiency 

With automated lead scoring, your sales reps clearly understand sales-worthy leads or those requiring nurturing or unqualified ones.  

This way, reps will be more precise about which leads they must focus on, thus enhancing the conversion rate. 

It saves times  

Manually watching out for lead engagement activities and then prioritizing can be a lot of time-consuming tasks.   

Plus, score errors with reps involved in multiple tasks might be possible.   

Therefore, adopting a lead-scoring automation system can be a time-saving deal. 

It increases accuracy  

Lead scoring is a marketing automation-driven process based solely on data and analytics. 

Your leads will become qualified and unqualified based on actions performed and conditions set up by you. Thus, it will remove the guesswork and increase accuracy.  

Moving to the next section, step-by-step learning on how to set up lead scoring automation.

How to set up automated lead scoring? 

Setting up a successful lead scoring could be daunting. But following the flow below will help you prioritize the ideal leads for your business. Let’s begin. 

Step 1: Identify your potential customer behavior  

The first step is to discover what makes a lead a perfect customer.  

So, discover and idealize a road map for your leads as per their behavior.   

For instance, your lead might explore your website and then can sign up for your dedicated product webinar after the website visit. 

After attending the webinar, they might be interested in having a free trial of your product (if you are a SaaS company) or can schedule a meeting with your reps. 

Another route can be a web visitor exploring your web pages, downloading the free resources, answering some qualifying questions with chatbot interaction, and then booking a meeting with your sales representative for further discussion. 

So, you must scan your potential customer’s behavior. It will inform you about your prospects’ actions and help you set your lead scoring attributes. 

Once you’ve got marketing qualified leads, your sales team can further target them to close. 

Step 2: Define criteria for your lead scoring model

You must define various criteria to score leads based on understanding your ideal customer behaviors and buyer persona.   

The criteria include; leads from a specific geographical location or company, job type (incased B2B) etc.   

Here’s the list of the most important qualifying criteria for scoring leads. 

Also, feed disqualifying criteria into your automated scoring system to assign negative scores.
Sales teams have a deeper understanding of buyer persona due to the direct interaction with sales qualified leads.

So, to boost your marketing efforts, it would be best for your sales and marketing teams to sit together to discover the qualifying criteria for the scoring models.

Step 3: Assign point values to a specific action performed 

Now that you’ve set up qualifying criteria based on customer engagement behavior, you must specify each action’s score. 

The lead score scale is often 1-100. The more towards a century score indicated the high probabilistic of buying intent.  

The higher the score of the leads, the more likeliness it is to make a purchase. 

You must assign scores to each brand engagement activity. See the example below. 

Businesses build a lead scoring model based on their requirements and ICPs, buyer persona, and behavior attributes to get qualified to begin sales conversations.

You can prioritize and qualify better with the help of a defined lead scoring model. Click to get the most potent scoring models that leading businesses are using.   

Step 4: Specify the lowest qualification score  

When setting up lead scoring automation, an essential step is to consider your threshold score, aka the minimum qualification score for a lead. 

Over time, a lead performs multiple actions that attribute different intents based on which scores are assigned. 

The minimum qualification score is the sum of all the points a lead gets through performing multiple actions that fall in your customer journey flow. 

Typically, on a scale of 1-100. Prospects with a higher lead score are considered more likely to move down with your sales funnel.

For instance, 80+ is a good score to qualify leads as MQLs.   

The easiest way is to track your lead’s journey from awareness to consideration till the decision stage and set up a specific score for each action performed. 

Check out the lead scoring best practices to set up successful automation. 

Step 5: Leverage a lead scoring software

You can manually score leads, but keeping track of score points for thousands of actions to calculate the lead score is not feasible for your marketing team.  

However, introducing lead-scoring software is an intelligent way to set up lead-scoring automation.  

Adopting lead scoring software including buying enriched lead data lets your marketing and sales reps get insight into the worthiness of leads, buying intent, closing opportunities, and many more.

With all these insights, you can improve your lead nurturing with personalization. 

For instance, if you know your lead has attended a product webinar, your reps can contact them via call or email for feedback to initiate a sales conversation.  

Lead scoring software is a robust tool that adds immense value to the business.   

If you’re looking for powerful lead-scoring software for your team, check out these 6 Best! 

Step 6: Assess and modify the lead score 

With a better understanding of the target audience, you can improve your lead scoring model to prioritize qualified leads for you.  

Over time, the lead’s journey toward becoming a paying customer might change, so you must assess your scoring model to modify it. 

The best is to create a process of timely assessing your lead scoring model to identify if there’s any way to improve! 

You can track your sales pipeline to see the conversion rate plus the entire customer journey to get the idea of modifying your scoring criteria. 

Also, the marketing and sales team has their learning on prospects’ behavior, needs, and challenges, so they must collaborate to determine ways to optimize your lead scoring system.

Automated lead scoring with Salesmate 

Salesmate is a robust CRM and Marketing Automation platform with an intuitive lead scoring feature, “Salesmate Score,” to identify high-quality leads.  

You can set up automated lead scoring based on actions taken and other engagements. In addition, it is easy to modify when needed. 

For instance, you can increase the score if the lead in your CRM updates their details like social media handles or websites.  

Here’s an example of how you can leverage lead scoring automation with Salesmate:

When the number of days matters for an ongoing conversation, you can set for depreciating scores and thus identify the most engaging prospect. 

Regarding business values, Salesmate is a unified customer platform that lets you seamlessly facilitate your business operations. 

Facilitate operations like… 

• Generating leads from various platforms to your CRM 
• Managing leads effectively to identify more opportunities for sales  
• Qualifying leads automatically and set for auto-assigning 
• Communicating via omnichannel for better customer relationships and sales opportunities 
• Nurturing with personalized campaigns and tracking the progress 
• Automating your tedious and repetitive tasks for a speedy operation 
• Conducting data-driven decisions with sales intelligence reports 

There are more values for managing your business, like multiple Sales Pipelines, custom dashboards, and Mobile CRM starting at just @$12/user/month.  

Bottomline 

Automating your lead scoring is a powerful way to save time and boost opportunities. 

It lets you prioritize and organize your contacts effortlessly.  

It enhances your rep’s work efficiency and saves time to invest in essential tasks like lead conversion activities.   

To set up lead scoring automation, you must build a strategy that aligns with your business goal.  

Invest in a unified customer platform like Salesmate that offers CRM, lead generation, and Marketing Automation so you can run your entire marketing and sales activities within.   

Plus, with CRM, it will automatically pass on your lead to the sales team. 

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