Freya Oxton-Grant
Aligning your sales and marketing teams is a key goal in making sure your building product business is running smoothly and efficiently. When sales and marketing are out of sync, it affects your growth, your bottom line, and your team’s morale.
When you make driving alignment between sales and marketing a key priority, you not only get everyone on the same page - working together on the same goals - but you will also experience an average growth of 20% in annual revenue, according to Aberdeen Group.
A vital part of achieving sales and marketing alignment can come from lead scoring.
An accurate lead scoring framework can focus your sales efforts, drive much higher win rates all while bringing Sales and Marketing onto the same page.
In this blog, we will discuss what lead scoring is, why it’s important, and how it can help you achieve sales and marketing alignment in your building product business.
What is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring a method of categorising leads by how likely they are to become a customer of your building product business, i.e. specify your product.
By classifying prospects by their level of commitment you can approach each architect or contractor with the right set of sales tactics that will most likely get them to convert.
A standard lead scoring model is points-based; leads with a high number of points indicates they are highly engaged with your business and closer to that finish line.
But what does lead scoring have to do with sales and marketing alignment?
Well, as part of this process, it is assumed your sales and marketing teams will have to work together on deciding what makes up an engaged prospect.
Then, they have to decide how each lead will be scored, what makes an architect deserve more ‘interest’ points than another, and finally, how do you work back from this to market to those type of architects.
When you align your sales and marketing teams around a lead scoring method you have a framework to work against, where Marketing knows they need to warm up leads until their reach that ideal ‘sales-ready’ level of points. Then Sales knows they need to engage this prospect with the right approach that recognises the strong opportunity they have in front of them.
How Lead Scoring Works
The data needed to work out the value of each prospect to your building product business will come from explicit and implicit information you have about them
It will start with demographic information they might have given to you when filling out a form or contacting your company. Then you can build up a stronger picture of them through monitoring their behaviour on your website, the pages they visit, the emails they click on, their interaction with your social media, and any content they have downloaded from you.
All of this information is vital to generating an accurate lead score for each architect and contractor in your CRM database. Side note: make sure you’re using an advanced CRM system that tracks all this information and compiles it together for easy access by your sales and marketing teams.
Why Lead Scoring is Effective
Lead scoring allows your Sales team to focus effort and resources on engaging architects who are most likely to specify your building product.
You can double down on your ‘hot’ leads, increasing your sales and also increasing your marketing ROI, as you achieve higher conversion rates.
Lead scoring is also an effective way to improve your pipeline forecasting.
When you set your Sales team to work, nurturing and talking to only ‘hot’ leads, you can create a predictable flow of prospects which are more qualified and more likely to convert. This can then translate into being easily able to determine ‘real’ conversion rates at each level of your sales funnel.
Finally, in the same vein to the sales team doubling down on high-quality leads, the marketing team has to then concentrate on which lead sources produce high scoring prospects.
A lead scoring system allows Marketing the ability to predict lead generation by lead source. The outcome is a more successful demand generation process, with high ROI.
When you hear statistics that 65% of businesses’ main challenge is generating traffic and leads, you might think that lead scoring could provide an answer to help them.
Conclusion
Lead scoring is a vital part of sales and marketing alignment and can benefit building product businesses by improving their lead management, pipeline forecasting, conversion rates, and marketing ROI.
Not to mention it can also increase sales productivity, as poor fit leads are ditched before any time is wasted on them.
Read our Complete Guide to Sales and Marketing Alignment here.
About Insynth
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.