What is Lead Scoring and Lead Qualification?

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Before jumping into strategies around behavior, it’s important to make sure your team has a basic understanding of these two parts in the lead generation cycle. Scoring and qualification are sometimes lumped together as one, but they’re two separate processes within the whole lead journey. 

Lead scoring assigns a value to leads, which is based on factors like behavior, demographics, and contact information. Qualification happens next. This looks at the lead in context to your company and what your team is selling.

Qualification determines the readiness of a lead, which helps your salespeople know if the prospect should be added into the sales pipeline or nurtured by the marketing team. From this information, your salespeople will be able to prioritize their efforts by focusing on leads who are most likely to convert.

Understanding that not every lead is a good fit for your company is crucial to avoiding wasted resources. In an effort to increase ROI, adopting a lead scoring strategy will help keep track of leads as they funnel in from different channels. This numerical value can sort leads in the CRM, which helps your team have an at-a-glance view of high value prospects. 

Lead qualification takes it a step further by looking at these lead scores and determining what the next action should be. These decisions can be based on pre-set criteria that your team deems necessary before pushing leads further into the sales cycle. It’s this signifying behavior that’ll help your sales team reach out to prospects at the right time. 

Timing is everything when it comes to sales. For some leads, there’s only one shot for a salesperson to nail the pitch, especially those who are further in their search for a solution. By using scores and qualification, your salespeople can take some of the guesswork out of their outreach.

Understanding and successfully utilizing these strategies will help give your team a competitive edge within the B2B industry. Lead generation is the lifeline of the sales funnel, and it’s important to invest in resources to better the generation process. 

The Importance of Scoring Leads

Your teams are putting in lots of effort to generate and gather leads. Being able to measure the success of these campaigns, as well as predict conversion rates, will help your company adjust efforts as needed. While sales is responsible for walking qualified leads through the process until a conversion happens, marketing plays a large role in lead generation.

Aligning these two departments helps create a smooth transition between lead hand-offs. It also ensures marketing is targeting the right type of prospects and sales isn’t wasting its time on unqualified leads. Scoring helps streamline this alignment and merge the efforts of both departments, which can help lead to a higher ROI on lead generation.

Operating in silos can create a major disconnect between departments. Sales has valuable information on how leads progress through the process as well as which prospects convert to a purchase. Marketing understands the channels where most leads come from, while also keeping an eye on engagement and any other pre-sales behavior.

Finding the best way to communicate this information between departments will help tailor efforts and target the right audiences for your solutions. Clear communication is vital to a successful lead generation strategy. From there, streamlining the hand-off process will help reduce confusion and create an overall better customer experience. 

Prospects will most likely interact with your brand or company before they speak to a salesperson. This could be through social media, on a webinar, or through website engagement. By creating a cohesive flow between your sales and marketing teams, it helps the customer see your company’s mission from different angles. 

The data collected from these interactions is incredibly valuable, just as the information gleaned from the sales cycle plays a large role in understanding target prospects. Lead scoring helps create a way to pass this data between teams while also using it to make decisions. Data-driven decisions can help your team prioritize efforts and improve the buying experience for your customers.

Scoring your leads can also keep your CRM up-to-date. Utilizing your CRM with both marketing and sales will allow teams to easily pass information along without worrying about missing important details. Keeping this system updated with clean data will also improve the lead qualification process.

Automation can be a game changer when adopting a scoring strategy. Rather than putting the workload on your teams, your company can utilize lead generation software like Leadboxer to automatically score leads as they come into the pipeline. In addition, this software integrates with your current techstack, so your CRM can house this information for both teams to see.

By having a visual on this scoring system, your teams will be able to determine which leads are viable, which may need more nurturing, and which ones are junk. This eliminates the back-and-forth between departments, and helps narrow down the scope of their lead generation strategies. As leads are scored based on predetermined criteria, marketing can focus on driving high scoring leads into the funnel while sales is able to prioritize and reach out accordingly. 

Understanding Lead Qualification

Once your team has a clear picture of lead scoring, you’ll want to make sure everyone is on the same page for lead qualification. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) refer to prospects that the marketing team has found through engagement across multiple channels and campaigns. From there, Sales Accepted Leads (SALs) are prospects who are considered by the sales team as those who may be ready to make a purchase.

Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) go a step further as leads who have a high chance of converting to a purchase, which means they should be prioritized by the sales team. Lead qualification helps your team analyze and sort leads into these categories to plan outreach. This process also helps refine marketing tactics to make sure campaigns are targeting the right kind of prospects. 

According to a Gartner survey, 34% of MQLs will be accepted by the sales team. From there, prospects that make it to SQL status are only 47% of the SALs. These numbers show how important it is to have a data-driven lead strategy that targets the right kind of prospects. 

Staying ahead of the competition in B2B sales means understanding your target audiences better than your competitors, as well as timing your outreach properly. With your marketing team putting in effort to collect leads, qualifying these prospects will play a role in refining their tactics. Knowing which leads are most likely to convert doesn’t have to be a guessing game either.

Lead scoring is the first step in understanding the likeliness of conversion with potential clients. This relies on knowing your ideal buyer profiles, having clear communication between sales and marketing, and not being scared to adjust your process over time. 

Not all leads will be purchase-ready when they enter the pipeline, but that doesn’t mean they won’t get there over time. Lead qualification relies on having a nurture strategy based on the lead score. Making sure to utilize your marketing channels to ensure prospects are being educated on your solutions helps showcase why your company is a good fit.

Segmenting leads, analyzing data like engagement actions, and using multiple touchpoints can help nurture leads to become SALs and SQLs. This pushes better qualified prospects over to your sales team, while gathering important data about your target audience. Using this information, as well as data collected throughout the sales cycle, will help inform your lead scoring and qualification process as well.

What is Intent Data?

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As we continue to dive deeper into the world of digital purchasing, data pushes itself to the forefront of every sales process. Buying online isn’t a new concept for most people, but emerging from our post-pandemic industries, it’s become the standard for purchasing, even in B2B sales. This means many prospects are likely to interact with your brand before your team even realizes they’re in the market for a solution.

Since most people start their search for a solution online, collecting and using data can provide valuable insight into your target audience. First-party intent data covers every point of information that your team collects about users. This includes marketing analytics, CRM profiles, and any other resources in your techstack that may be tracking behavior. 

Third-party is the other type of intent data, and it refers to similar information collected by other websites. While third-party can be valuable as well, it doesn’t mean you need to completely ignore first-party data. Your team is putting in time and effort to collect this information about current and prospective customers, so it’s important to use it successfully.

There are a couple of categories within first-party intent data. This information is typically tracked through cookies and IP addresses to help your team get a full picture of engagement across your sites. 

First, there’s anonymous behavioral data that comes from unknown engagement on your site. This is information collected from those who may not have taken a step that reveals who they are, like filling out a form or attending a webinar. It may seem impossible to track who is doing this engagement, but that’s where your techstack can help.

Using lead generation software, like Leadboxer, can connect the dots and uncover these visitors. Then, this data can be added into your CRM or any other data warehouses to help complete the prospect’s profile. 

Next, known behavioral data comes from visitors who have previously given identifying information, like web form submissions. These leads may have interacted with your site in different ways, but they’ve provided directly given their contact information. 

This information helps paint a picture for your team by providing the behavior of leads as they interact with your brand. Contact information, demographics, and company name is a great starting point for lead generation, but intent data takes everything to another level. Using this data properly will help your team stay ahead of the competition.

The Importance of First-Party Intent Data

While relying on behavioral data is not a new concept, first-party intent data has launched itself to the forefront of marketing recently. Google announced their phasing out of third-party data in early 2024. Hubspot found that marketers stated this announcement had the biggest impact on their yearly marketing strategy.

This announcement doesn’t mean behavioral data can’t be used in B2B strategy, but rather puts the focus on collected first-party information. Collecting and storing first-party data also takes reliance on third-party companies out of the equation. Your team is putting in the effort to track analytics and generate leads, so it makes sense to utilize the data gathered by these actions.

Most companies understand how competitive the B2B industry can be, especially when competing for customers. Adobe found that despite the announcement from Google, third-party reliance is still something 75% of marketers use. To stay a few steps ahead of your competition, using your first-party intent data can be extremely useful.  

Behavioral data coming straight from your marketing efforts is a great way to better understand your customers. It also helps with your brand image since third-party data usage can bring up privacy concerns from prospective users. Encouraging actions that can collect this type of information is great for obtaining further insight into your target audience.

Your team is probably already using some type of form submission, but it’s important to view this as a way to capture first-party data. Registrations for free trials or accounts can provide valuable customer data while also showcasing a lead’s readiness for your solution. Surveys and downloadable content behind web forms are another great way to capture first-party intent data. 

For example, if a lead engaging with your website decides to download a white paper about your solutions, this might be a signal they’re ready for a sales touchpoint. By providing the prospect with a form before they can download the paper, your team can capture their contact information and add their behavioral data to the profile in the CRM. This helps qualify the lead as someone who is actively seeking a solution and may be interested in your company. 

Email marketing and social media platforms can also capture behavioral data. Tracking subscribers, engagement metrics, and demographic information can help your team understand who is interested in your company. From there, your marketing and salespeople are able to better target leads with data-driven campaigns.

Purchase history can help your team fully understand what type of customer benefits from your products. Along with this, customer feedback through sales conversations, customer support outreach, and survey responses provides valuable insight. This data comes after a lead converts to a customer, but it still plays a role in nailing down your scoring and qualification tactics. 

Getting to know your current customers on a deeper level helps provide a better experience for them, as well as for any new prospects. Your clients are a wealth of knowledge when it comes to understanding how well your company’s solutions stack up to the competition. Using the data collected through your sales and marketing efforts can increase ROI and conversions. 

Behavioral data can also help your team catch leads earlier in their search. When a prospect begins looking for a solution, they’re most likely not going to reach out directly to a salesperson. They’ll start by searching on the internet and checking out websites.

This means your sales team may have no idea one of their ideal customers is on the search for a solution until they’re well into their search. However, tracking and using first-party data can help uncover these leads and push them into the sales funnel quicker. Getting on the lead’s radar during their research phase can play a large role in chances of conversion later.

By using behavioral data to qualify leads, your salespeople are able to see what actions these prospects have taken to determine where they are in the buying process. From there, outreach can be timed properly to make sure the pitch comes when the lead is most likely ready to convert. It also helps segment prospects into appropriate groups for further nurturing if they’re not quite ready for a sales interaction.

Behavior-Based Strategies in B2B Lead Generation

With all of this in mind, creating a comprehensive strategy for using intent data will help your company stay aligned with its goals. Taking the necessary steps to properly collect, store, and utilize this information will help your teams stay ahead of the competition.

First, standardizing your collection of data pools is important for several reasons. If you have data stored in multiple houses, there’s a chance not all of these collections are speaking to each other, which means things can fall through the cracks. Storing data in a centralized location where your teams can access as needed can help make this information more operational.

According to a survey by Demand Gen, buyer intent data made up for the biggest gaps in client profiles for 33% of marketers. In the same report, investing further into intent data is a priority for 65% of B2B companies. By standardizing the collection process for data, as well as keeping it in one place, your teams will be able to utilize this information as well as spot any gaps.

From this data, ranking leads on likeliness to convert will help prioritize efforts. Lead scoring becomes more accurate when based on data, and your team can use these numerical values to determine when to act. 

Using intent data can also help your scoring stay as accurate as possible. Continually auditing, testing, and changing your system as the industry evolves will help your salespeople stay focused on qualified leads. Behavioral data can provide valuable insight into industry changes, so don’t be afraid to make changes to your scoring system as needed. 

Finally, using this information can help your team push out curated content that addresses the needs and pain points of potential buyers. Every interaction with your brand is valuable, so you want to make sure your team is creating messaging that speaks to your target audience. Behavioral data helps uncover the underlying actions of your customers, which can provide insight into their needs.

Demand Gen found that two-thirds of prospects prefer self-service when going through the customer journey. With that in mind, it’s important to frame your marketing outreach in a way that educates and informs potential buyers of your solutions. If leads are walking themselves through the sales cycle, most of their information on your solutions will be coming directly from marketing efforts.

By understanding signifying behavior, your team is able to put together content that will help convert these leads to sales. Avoiding fluff content and providing accessible educational materials can do a lot of lift work for these prospects. 

Allowing a data-driven strategy to provide a framework for your lead scoring and qualifying efforts can help your team increase conversions. Get started with a free trial of Leadboxer’s lead scoring tools today!