Salesforce Lead Scoring: What It Is and How To Set It Up

Salesforce is a powerful platform, but without understanding how these features can benefit your business, you could be wasting your money and setting your team up for failure. Lead scoring in Salesforce can be a formidable tool for your business and knowing how it works is critical to using it to its full potential. 

What Is Salesforce Lead Scoring? 

What is lead scoring in Salesforce? Salesforce lead scoring is a technique that assigns a numerical value to potential customers. These values indicate an individual’s level of interest in your business based on a scoring model created by your team.  

When a lead is over a certain threshold, your marketing department sends their information to your sales team. From there, your sales reps can guide them further through the sales funnel.  

The Benefits of Using Lead Scoring in Salesforce 

Salesforce opportunity scoring replaces many outdated manual processes to determine which leads are “hot.” 

Gone are the days when marketing and sales departments had to waste time recalculating criteria and crunching data to decide which consumers were worth pursuing. Artificial intelligence takes care of that by generating accurate lead scores and identifying sales opportunities. 

Streamlines Marketing and Sales Team Processes and Alignment 

Because lead scoring quantifies a lead’s potential, your teams’ methods can become more focused and clear. There is no room for confusion about which leads to pursue because the scoring system does the prioritizing. 

Also, lead scoring sets your marketing and sales teams up for success by automating many of their current business processes. With streamlined protocols, your sales and marketing alignment can reach optimal levels and save valuable time. 

Improves Customer Experience and Conversion Rates 

Today’s consumers are savvy. They can recognize generic content quickly and will ignore anything they perceive as disingenuous. Lead scoring helps your marketing staff target content toward your leads. You build trust between your business and your consumers by evaluating what is important to your leads and generating content aligned with that insight. 

With an accurate scoring model, your staff will know exactly where each lead is located within the sales funnel and can focus more on the consumers with the most potential. By doing so, they will have higher conversion rates which will save your business time and money. 

Provides Powerful Insights Into Sales Activities and Sales Process 

When your sales team knows the metrics around their ideal consumers, they can begin to build their ideal customer profile. This knowledge will provide a baseline data set to further streamline their activities and processes. Armed with a points system, previously ambiguous information becomes clear and actionable, maximizing everyone’s time and making all methods more intentional. 

Salesforce Einstein can also bring the power of artificial intelligence to your lead scoring. This product learns from your business’s own data and patterns, then creates a predictive model to determine which leads have the highest potential. This gives you valuable data for outreach, specifically tailored to your business and your customers. 

Best Practices for Salesforce Lead Scoring 

Some best practices to make Salesforce lead scoring work for your business include: 

• Prioritizing criteria: Understanding what consumer actions generate sales for your business is of the utmost importance. Identifying what attributes your ideal customers have in common will give you invaluable insight. Taking the time to read through your customers’ profiles can be time-consuming in the planning stages but lead to more targeted efforts that can pay off. 

• Automating actions: Communicating the right way with your leads is essential to building the trust that generates sales. With Salesforce, you can automate actions when your potential customers meet certain scoring thresholds. You can also automatically assign team members to specific points within the sales pipeline so they can be engaged when a lead meets their criteria. Automating these processes removes the guesswork in converting potential customers into actual and long-term ones. 
• Cleaning your data: A messy database is a burden on your business. Duplicate entries or incorrect contact information can mean communications that are sent more than once to the same person or communications that don’t reach their intended target at all. Having a clean database will eliminate duplicate records and ensure that all contact information is accurate and up to date. 
• Understanding your fields: Regardless of your company size, not everyone can be a Salesforce expert. However, your staff knowing what data populates a score field or the various formula fields can give them a better understanding of the platform, which will only make it a more effective tool. 

Establish Scoring Rules and Train Team on Lead Scoring 

Because you communicate differently with leads depending on where they are in the customer lifecycle, it is critical to tailor your company’s scoring rules based on past sales information. One tip that businesses should remember is that you do not have to consider every data point when first establishing your scoring rules. Begin with the basics so you don’t overwhelm the process. You can always expand these rules later on. 

Regularly Review and Update Scoring Criteria 

Because your company will grow, your scoring models must grow with it. What was successful yesterday may not necessarily be successful tomorrow, and your efforts must consistently be open to evolving with the changing market. Failing to do so can make your business irrelevant and your potential customers will quickly recognize that. Even if your sales continue to grow, it is critical to regularly review and update your scoring criteria.  

Utilize Lead Scoring In Conjunction With Other Sales and Marketing Tools  

Rather than thinking of Salesforce lead scoring as a replacement for your business’s current tools and systems, think of it as an enhancement. Of course, Salesforce can take the place of many old fashioned processes and tools, but there are also many features that can be used along with other sales and marketing efforts. By leveraging your existing and successful systems, you can make the most of Salesforce in a way that is optimized for your specific business. 

Get Experts To Help Set Up Salesforce Lead Scoring Today 

If you want to utilize all that Salesforce has to offer, it’s vital to get expert lead scoring help. Teaming up with experienced professionals focuses your efforts in the right direction to save you time and money. Contact Astreca today to see how we can help you take advantage of Salesforce lead scoring. 

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