Poor lead prioritization can be devastating to companies as it causes them to miss out on legitimate sales opportunities. Even if you resort to top-notch sales tactics, they cannot work if your team spends time chasing after unqualified leads. To learn more about the importance of lead scoring for B2B organizations, check out our Complete Guide to B2B Lead Scoring.

Predictive lead scoring ensures the sales personnel spend more time with leads with higher conversion rates, driving up your company’s bottom line.

But to do that, you need large volumes of data to work with as the accuracy of the predictions increases with the accumulation of more information about your customer base.

What Is Predictive Lead Scoring?

Predictive lead scoring is a methodology that uses algorithmic determination to qualify incoming leads and determine the likelihood of a sale.

This approach essentially applies big data to assess the existing customers' critical behaviors, and develops a ranking system that singles out the clients with a high likelihood to convert.

Unlike traditional lead scoring, this method is a lot more accurate.

Why Is Predictive Lead Scoring Important?

Did you know that the data created every month worldwide is 75 quintillion bytes of data, which means 2.5 quintillions every day? Interestingly, you have a role in collecting some of the data if you are involved in any activity on the internet, including sending emails using CRM software.

But, have you started to evaluate your data and use it to generate a lead scoring system? If you haven't, you are underutilizing your software and losing out on a significant revenue amount.

Organizations that use traditional leads spend a lot of time on non-value-added tasks by carrying out some tedious, manual activities while sorting through leads that arise.

Predictive lead scoring does all of the dirty work for you. Below are the benefits of using predictive lead scoring.

• Reduction of errors since it eliminates the human element in the analysis.

• Provision of data-backed information for better decision-making, which increases their confidence when making decisions.

• Everything is Analyzed, enabling you to have a 360-degree view of your data.

• New patterns and relationships quickly realized that you might have missed had not seen before

• More real-time analytics since predictive lead scoring quickly and regularly scrutinizes all of your data.

• Reduction of cost you incur with unqualified leads.

How Predictive Lead Scoring Differs from Traditional Lead Scoring

Lead scoring involves assigning various numerical qualifiers to prospective customers based on relevant data: explicit or implicit. A typical example of a prospect providing explicit data is submitting a form that contains information that would further qualify them, be it their job title, company size, or annual revenue.

Implicit data characterizes behavior-based information, such as online engagement frequency, blog subscriptions, etc.

In traditional lead scoring, sales reps determine qualified leads by ranking the impact of specific actions. For example, marketers may consider a visitor who searches, lands on your website, and fills out a form to have a higher lead score than a user who only reads a blog and bounces.

Additionally, they may assign a higher lead score to a person who clicks a link in an email than someone who only opens it. In an ideal world, accurate lead scores enable sales reps to send quality leads and their information to the sales team.

However, leads are subject to error due to imprecision. Most of the time, marketers rely on their subjective judgment instead of concrete historical data patterns to gauge actions they consider relevant to identify buyer intent. Unfortunately, such reliance on inaccurate scores proves to be inefficient as the sales team may spend a lot of time pursuing unqualified leads.

That's why predictive lead scoring is a game-changer: It eliminates or reduces human errors and enhances accuracy. A data-driven tool brings together past and current data to develop a model that predicts future outcomes. Isn’t that the magic wand that every business dreams of? 

What’s more, predictive lead scoring can generate an ideal profile of a perfect lead based on the potent blend of historical and current data, identifying patterns and relationships that marketers might not have noticed before.  

Is Predictive Right for You?

If you are looking for an excellent way to manage your company's growth, consider lead scoring. It is not always realistic to pursue every single lead as the business grows and generates more leads.

For that reason, your sales team should prioritize their time depending on the quality of the leads. Consider the following tips before deploying lead scoring.

1. The Number of Leads

A business may not generate many leads, especially in its early stages. During this time, you are still trying to figure out the characteristics of a qualified lead.

Therefore, you don't need to put lead scoring into effect. Instead, consider having conversations with your leads to identify certain commonalities among those who become your paying customers.

2. Effectiveness of Your Sales team

The process of implementing lead scoring might take some time and could be subject to various challenges.

Determining the variables to factor into your equation and the scores to attribute them calls for a lot of input.

Therefore, you should check whether the sales team takes action and reaches out to the leads you send them before pouring your resources into lead scoring.

3. The Amount of Data

Before you get the lead scoring ball rolling, you must have a few components at hand. First, you must arm yourself with a lot of data related to those who converted into sales and those who didn’t. You would then need the attributes of qualified and unqualified leads.

Therefore, it’s recommended to gain significant, actionable insights before implementing lead scoring to your sales process.

Conclusion

When done right, predictive lead scoring is a springboard that launches sales teams to great success. Additionally, it helps unearth critical insights into your customer base.

But this tool is only as good as your data, and quality data is getting increasingly harder to come by. To make sure you wring every last drop of value out of predictive lead scoring, contact People Data Labs today, and we will show you how our custom data solutions can move the needle in your sales.

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