What It Is and Why It’s Important

If your marketing team and the systems you put in place to generate leads are working properly, you will likely see between 10 and 1,000 new leads every week. If you have a robust sales team, they might be able to contact every single lead in a matter of hours.

However, if you’re like most companies, your sales team needs to prioritize to reach the “best” leads quickly while saving the “less likely” leads for last. This doesn’t mean they can’t be converted, there is just a lesser chance of attracting these prospects as customers.

The time you spend referring the wrong prospect is not only pointless exercise, but it also takes time out of your sales reps and prevents them from closing sales and making money for your business. Then how do you make the work of your salespeople easier (and more lucrative)?

Predictive lead scoring can take the guesswork out of following up on leads. Let’s take a look at what it is and how it can help your business grow.

What is predictive lead scoring?

Before we define predictive lead scoring, it’s important to understand traditional lead scoring and its limitations.

Organizations have struggled for decades to prioritize lead tracking. In many cases, salespeople are left to their own devices and decide to the best of their knowledge who to contact first. Marketers and salespeople use data such as demographic information (age, marital status, industry, role) to rank potential customers based on their likelihood of buying. Those who rank high on this scale are contacted first, others last, or, if time does not allow, not at all.

The problem with this subjective process is that it is … subjective. Sellers are forced to rely on “gut instinct” and consider their own historical experience to make this decision. Neither are proving to be consistently accurate, causing quality leads to slip through the cracks as they chase prospects who are unlikely to buy.

Predictive lead scoring is machine learning that takes this theory one step further by using predictive modeling algorithms to analyze data from past customers and current prospects to predict future outcomes. In other words, predictive lead scoring offers the possibility of creating an “ideal customer profile” based on previous purchasing behavior and then identifying which current prospects best fit this profile. It removes the possibility of human error or bias and instead relies on hard data to make its predictions.

The benefits of predictive lead scoring

If your marketing and sales teams are struggling to identify top leads and are unable to contact everyone entered into your database, predictive lead scoring can be just what your business needs. With a multitude of benefits, it’s like hiring another department to help with new customer acquisition.

The benefits of predictive lead scoring include:

1. Create harmony between marketing and sales

When that many leads are coming in but not many sales are being made, these two departments can attack each other. Marketing doesn’t understand how to generate large numbers of leads that sales can’t close. And the sales department believes quantity is more important than quality, and they don’t get it Well leads.

The inclusion of predictive lead scoring will help these two departments work together and produce more.

2. Save time

An automated lead scoring system means your marketing and sales teams no longer have to waste time reviewing prospects. Your time can be better used to generate more leads and pursue the right ones.

3. Remove human errors

No matter how well (and quickly) your reps rate potential customers, there will always be an inherent bias. People cannot approach a situation without resorting to memories of the past. No matter how objective you want to be, that bias will creep into every decision you make. Using a computer algorithm to make these decisions eliminates the possibility of human error or judgment.

4. Lightning fast results

Although it takes some time to set up, once predictive lead scoring is in place, you’ll get results significantly faster than if one person did the job. You get high quality, data-driven leads before a human employee can even get their coffee.

5. See Continuous Improvement

As you close and serve more customers, you collect more data. The more data you have, the better predictive lead scoring works and the more data points you have to process.

Predictive lead scoring is ready to work for you and make your marketing and sales teams more efficient.

How to integrate predictive lead scoring into your company

Now that you know how predictive lead scoring can revolutionize your business, how do you get started?

HubSpot offers predictive lead scoring software that integrates with your corporate CRM and provides machine learning that examines thousands of data points in your contact base to identify your best leads.

These data points come from analytics (website and email behavior), firmographic information about the contact’s company and their relationship within HubSpot, and interactions that have been logged in the CRM.

How to use this feature:

1. In the main navigation bar of your HubSpot account, click the Settings icon.
2. In the left sidebar menu, navigate to CRM> Properties.
3. Search in Contact information Property group for Probability to close and Contact priority.

Probability to close is a score that represents the probability that a contact will be closed as a customer within the next 90 days. It uses standard contact properties and behavior to predict this. If the score or probability value is 22, it means the chance of closing as a customer in the next 90 days is 22%.

Contact priority uses the Probability to close score for filtering segments of your best and worst leads.

As you collect more data, the system improves itself, makes even better predictions, and leads you to the most important leads. Since the program needs data to do its job, you will not see any values ​​for Contact priority until you have reached 100 contacts.

If you want your business to grow and your team members to thrive, predictive lead scoring is essential. Imagine what your company will be like five, 10 or 15 years from now, when the system you use to attract and acquire new customers is fully optimized.

Give your marketing and sales teams an edge over the competition and try predictive lead scoring today.