Qualification of leads is very critical to sales effectiveness and business success. One of B2B marketing company’s key challenges is to identify leads that provide the best opportunities for the sales team.

1. Lead Scoring for Sales Effectiveness
Qualification of leads is very critical to sales effectiveness and business success. One of B2B marketing
company’s key challenges is to identify leads that provide the best opportunities for the sales team.
According to a recent study by Gartner, “up to 70% of sales leads are not properly leveraged or are
completely ignored, thus wasting marketing program dollars."
The sales enablement process helps sales teams to deliver value to prospects at the right time. However,
there is one important aspect to identifying leads that can help sales teams to qualify prospects and focus
efforts in the right direction – lead scoring. Lead scoring helps to rank prospects based on many factors.
Uses of Lead Scoring
● Lead scoring helps to align sales follow-up to the right person, thereby accelerating the buying
process.
● The process of scoring even helps bridge the sales marketing disconnect. This is possible
because both teams can work effectively based on feedback from each other regarding the
prospective customer.
● The best thing about lead scoring is it helps to prioritize sales follow based on the sales readiness
of the prospect.
With robust marketing automation applications, leads can now be automatically scored and prioritized
based on their website activity, interest and intent. Based on lead scoring, marketing teams can
differentiate between leads that are sales ready and those that are not. Accordingly they can pass on the
sales ready leads to sales and focus their efforts on lead nurturing for the others.
Marketing automation software can provide the following benefits to lead scoring process.
● It allows sales and marketing teams to define the parameters for a 'good' lead in advance, based
on which it then classifies all leads.
● It monitors every click and keystroke, to understand where the visitors are in their buying cycle
and which of them are exhibiting key buying indicators.
● The scoring rules use the right combination of implicit and explicit information about a website
visitor to determine their identity and quality.
● The website activity data that is accumulated over a period of time and when combined with a
company level view can become a powerful tool in qualifying leads.
Automated lead scoring process makes sales more efficient by helping them focus on the hottest leads
first and get to them with a relevant solution in real time.

2. Read on - lead management software, lead nurturing best practices