The benefits of lead nurturing and lead scoring

Before jumping straight into the benefits, what do the terms ‘lead nurturing’ and ‘lead scoring’ mean?

Lead nurturing is the process of building and managing relationship with leads that are interested in potentially becoming customers, but are not necessarily ready to buy now. The objective is to develop a rapport and establish trust and credibility by helping people through their buying process. This ensures that there is a much higher probability of winning their business when they are eventually ready to buy.

Lead scoring is the process of assigning a score to contacts and leads based on their interactions with your business, their behaviour, level of engagement, buyer persona as well as other criteria. Each action has a specific point value determined by the seller and these values are automatically accrued as leads progress through their buying process. (This also includes lead nurturing activity). When the total points value or lead score hits a pre-determined level, the lead can be passed to sales along with the history of that contacts interactions and engagement to date. This gives the sales team all of the information they need to start a productive dialogue with contacts that have demonstrated they are ready to buy.

Lead nurturing and lead scoring usually go hand in hand and are typically implemented via a marketing automation system such as SharpSpring or Hubspot—but what are the benefits?

There are many but here are some of the key ones:
- Making better use of expensive sales resources by focusing their time on engaged and motivated buyers
- Increasing sales revenues organically by converting a higher number of opportunities
- Providing the sales team with highly qualified leads who are ready to buy and already educated regarding the product or service
- Reducing the sales cycle by engaging the sales team at the appropriate time
- Prioritising the hottest leads for follow up and sales intervention
- Aligning marketing activity with sales objectives and improving the ROI from marketing
- Turning the website from a brochure to an always available sales resource
- Providing a cost-effective way of engaging with influencers and referrers who may not purchase themselves, but will influence others to buy
- Achieving competitive advantage by delivering a better prospect experience

No-brainer or what! With marketing automation systems readily available and cost-effective to implement, there has never been a better time to start nurturing and scoring your leads.