With lead scoring, HubSpot automates a lot of marketing and sales processes for your team. It prevents your employees from spending hours analyzing the responses they receive while nurturing your leads. HubSpot lead scoring is an essential marketing automation element that enhances your marketing and sales processes.
What Is HubSpot lead scoring?
HubSpot lead scoring is the automated process of giving scores to your leads based on their behaviors. As your business grows and you encounter more leads, it becomes difficult to cater to everyone. Moreover, not all leads are worth spending your time and money on.
HubSpot prevents such complications by helping you score your lead according to their actions as they engage with you. HubSpot lead scoring involves analyzing your prospects’ behaviors and ranking them according to their interest in engaging with your business. It is similar to getting scores in an examination.
HubSpot lead scoring helps you identify the prospects showing more or less interest in your products/services. To obtain the best results and increase your conversion rate, your marketing and sales teams will nurture high-scoring leads first. This increases the chances of your leads converting into customers without encountering failures.
How Does HubSpot Lead Scoring Work?
If your company encounters numerous leads frequently, HubSpot lead scoring helps you prioritize leads worth nurturing based on one or more attributes. The CRM solution helps you score your leads based on these attributes.
For example, if a prospect visits your landing page thrice, it indicates their interest in your offerings. HubSpot helps you convert this behavior into a score. When you do so, you can set a benchmark for every lead visiting your page and score them accordingly. This way, you can prioritize nurturing leads that frequent your landing page, increasing the lead conversion chances.
You can keep your lead scores positive or negative depending on the actions and attributes you want to target. It makes the difference between different leads clearer, letting you make easier decisions.
Why Is HubSpot Lead Scoring Important?
Here are a few important benefits of scoring your leads using HubSpot:
Cost-effective Lead Management
The biggest benefit of HubSpot lead scoring is that it reduces your lead management costs. Nurturing your leads is an expensive process as it involves a bunch of resources. As mentioned earlier, not every lead is worth spending your time and money behind.
HubSpot lead scoring helps you identify the leads that are most likely to convert and give you the desired results. It prevents you from spending money following up with prospects who are not interested in buying your products or services. Scoring your leads shows you a cost-effective path to lead management.
A Focused Approach
Just like marketing your brand to everyone leads to spreading yourself thin, nurturing every lead you acquire is not worth your team’s efforts. Irrespective of your operational scale, never make the mistake of catering to every single lead until you lose it.
HubSpot lead scoring narrows your focus to the most important leads. It helps you identify the leads that are likely to close your deal and take your focus away from everything else. With a focused approach, you will channel all your resources behind what is best for your business and nurture the leads that convert.
Marketing And Sales Collaboration
Aligning your marketing and sales teams is always a good idea. Almost every qualified lead goes through both departments before it is converted into a customer.
HubSpot lead scoring helps you build a comprehensive scoring framework by taking inputs from your sales and marketing reps. An ideal blend between the two departments lets you create a robust model.
Moreover, HubSpot lead scoring ensures that both sales and marketing departments are on the same page. In most cases, marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are transferred to the sales department before a sale is conducted. The arrangement works like clockwork, organizing lead management within your company.
Approaching Prospects At The Right Time
You will rarely encounter a lead where a prospect immediately agrees to buy your products or services. Once acquired, leads pass through different stages before they convert into customers. Your marketing and sales reps need to approach these leads during these stages to ensure a smooth sales cycle.
Your team members can approach the right prospects at the right time by scoring leads with HubSpot. As the marketing or sales executives nurture your leads, they can see the prospects’ actions and behaviors. This helps them tap into the right opportunity to approach them at the right time. Striking while the iron is hot helps you convert otherwise colder leads!
HubSpot Lead Scoring Models
There are two major HubSpot lead scoring models based on the scoring nature and approach – predictive lead scoring and manual lead scoring. Choose the scoring model that best suits your needs and is likely to give you more traction.
Predictive Lead Scoring Model
This is the lead scoring model where HubSpot automates the process. Here, the CRM platform uses machine learning to score your leads based on their behaviors. The AI tools analyze hundreds of data points to obtain a prospect’s lead score.
The predictive lead scoring model uses data from past customer interactions and matches it with your current prospects to make valid predictions. It scans your database and considers the attributes that have led to conversions. This data is used to predict the probability of your leads converting.
This model works on the belief that all lead conversions have some common attributes. By skimming through such similarities, the system predicts the leads that are more likely to convert than others. The predictive model becomes more effective as you add more data to your system. Feeding your system with more data helps the AI tools to analyze more records, thereby improving their results.
Manual Lead Scoring Model
As opposed to predictive lead scoring, manual lead scoring in HubSpot involves scoring leads with the help of your sales and marketing teams’ inputs. Instead of AI and machine learning making the decisions, this model involves manual contributions to scoring leads.
Here, the lead scoring attributes are carefully chosen by your team members. Depending on their preferences, your sales and marketing reps assign numerical scores to your leads, denoting their importance.
However, it is important to note that the manual lead scoring model does not eliminate automation completely. The manual aspect is limited to identifying attributes and setting lead scores. Once the scores are set and fed into the system, HubSpot will automatically start scoring your leads based on the same.
HubSpot's manual lead scoring model is more reliable and preferred as it combines manual efforts and automation. While it prevents AI from completely taking over your lead-scoring strategy, it also prevents your teams from performing repetitive processes manually.
The Final Word
For starters, a marketer should know these key aspects regarding HubSpot lead scoring. Lead management is an interesting feature; a lot more can be discovered if you dive deeper.