Best Practices in B2B Lead Scoring

Three Best Practices for Better B2B Lead Scoring

The new rules of engagement require you to get smarter about how you work the phone to ensure that you maximize every dollar spent on phone work.   One requirement for b2b lead generation is to align your inside sales team with your marketing team by intelligently leveraging a marketing automation platform like Pardot for better lead scoring.  This blog is part 2 of a 2 part series.  Part 1  addressed the basics of sales b2b lead scoring to improve the performance of your sales and marketing b2b lead generation investment.   Part 2 now introduces a framework to make your content marketing easier with a couple simple tips and some tool suggestions.

What’s does a solid process look like?

A solid process requires the basics we discussed in Part 1 of this series and the ability to capture both inferred data and direct data.

As each lead takes any action, their score will change.  Your sales reps need to leverage your CRM to capture the Direct Data when they engage the prospect.  Your Marketing teams will also collect direct data with well-built forms for inbound leads. Marketing Automation Software and a smart Content Management System makes collecting inferred data easy because it will track what type of content your prospects are looking at when they are visiting your website and social media sites.  What you end up with is a composite score. The higher the score, the more qualified the lead.  Below is a picture pulled from our platform.

best practices in sales lead scoring example

How do I Score My Content? – B2B Lead Scoring Best Practice #2

The key to making your marketing automation software more productive is to design content around specific buying stages.

b2b lead scoring road map

From there B2B lead scoring is easy:

  • Educational Content like basic blog posts would get a score of 1
  • Richer Educational Content and Whitepapers would get a score of 5
  • Road Maps, Media Kits and Sales Sheets, Comparisons would get a score of 25
  • Rate Cards, About Us Pages, Case Studies, and Technical Sheets would get a score of 100 and you would immediately flag these for sales to jump on to determine next actions

What if I Don’t Have A Lot of Content? – B2B Lead Scoring Best Practice #3

You need to get smarter about making your content work harder with a smart content management system that’s easy for non-technical employees to use (like WordPress) and a custom install of Gabriel Sales Digital Sales Basecamp™ as a tool to both, isolate content and to create landing pages, with a click of a mouse.  This system allows you to customize your content for specific verticals,  repurpose you content for specific decision makers so they can self-educate and, simultaneously, to isolate your content around specific buying stages.

The second step is to use a smart content management system like Gabriel Sales Digital Sales Basecamp and your Blog to organize your content so buyers can self- educate more easily and so you can offer your buyer different stage content on the same page.

Learn how to build a powerful B2B lead generation system, integrating sales and marketing, by viewing our resource page here.