Lead Grading Can Help Your Sales (and Marketing) Teams Seamlessly Drive Engagement and RoI

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Keeping your sales and marketing teams on the same page is a tough task. Both may have their own opinions about who does what and when. To be fair, both may be correct in their own way. If marketing is responsible for creating a reason for customers to buy from your brand, it is the sales team that ultimately brings in the money. From a business perspective, a conflict between the two can result in lost time and effort.

If your sales and marketing teams are pulling in opposite directions, you need a tangible, quantifiable approach that leaves no room for second-guessing. This is especially critical when it comes to lead nurturing and conversion. 

You probably know of hundreds of businesses that use lead management workflows to help their sales and marketing teams identify new business opportunities with the highest payoff. These automated tools help both teams see the impact they are making on the bottom line on a near real-time basis. As a prospect enters the marketing funnel, getting to know their level of interest in your product or service is critical to starting a conversation on the right note. Put another way, this stage is where you ask,” How well does this prospect fit my target customer persona?” 

If a visitor has requested a free consultation or filled out the opt-in lead form on your website, you can safely assume that he/she is interested in knowing more about your product. This is where you can add them to your list of potential leads and rank them based on their relative interest through a process called Lead Grading.

What is Lead Grading?

As the name suggests, Lead Grading is the process of allocating numerical values to the leads and categorizing them accordingly as Hot, Warm, or Cold. Depending on your industry or average sales cycle, you can choose how to score leads based on specific actions they take. 

Here are a few lead scoring parameters used by some leading brands:

Grading on the basis of web pages viewed:

Depending on the number of webpages a prospect browses, it is easy to determine whether he or she is likely to buy. Many brands categorize leads with 1 to 2 page views as ‘Cold’; anywhere between 3 to 5 views, ‘Warm’; and greater than 5 page views as ‘Hot’.

Grading on the basis of the amount of time spent on your site:

Leads can also be assigned a numerical value based on the amount of time they spend on your site, interacting with your brand/product. Grading on the basis of time spent can be generally classified as ‘Cold’ for visits lasting between 0 to 30 seconds; ‘Warm’ for visits that are 30 to 90 sec long and ‘Hot’ for visits longer than 90 seconds.

Grading on the basis of Number of sessions: 

Depending upon your definition of a quality user, leads can also be classified into intent-based buckets. These can be determined by demographic factors such as age, income, position, or disclosed preferences provided through lead forms, etc.

How does it enhance sales team efficiency?

Now for the most important question: how does it help in creating a common playbook for your sales and marketing teams? Lead grading is excellent for prioritizing leads in intent-based categories before deciding when to reach out to them. This helps in prioritizing high-quality leads and engage with them faster, enabling a better customer experience. 

Lead grading can also help you build a separate team to identify the pain points of very high-quality leads and convert them efficiently. In addition, it can allow you to track the performance of your sales reps based on their conversion rates of hot, warm and cold leads.

This can allow you to allocate the best leads to your top-performing sales reps and boost conversion rates.

EasyInsights – Connects all your Ad & Analytics platform and passes the Lead score to CRM

With EasyInsights, your marketing and sales teams can get crystal clear on which leads to pursue first, closing sales faster while boosting engagement. This directly translates into better RoI over the average customer journey. EasyInsights interfaces seamlessly with your CRM, ad-platforms, and analytics tools, giving you a 360-degree view of the users interacting with your brand. It streamlines the lead nurturing process by automatically scoring each lead and handing them off to the CRM for your sales team to take over.

If you see an opportunity for better communication between your sales representatives and their counterparts in marketing, EasyInsights can help in bridging the gap. Firstly, it can readily sharpen the focus of your sales representatives by systemically identifying the leads with the highest potential for conversion. This can help boost the number of sales closed per interaction and provide better RoI. Leads that are tagged as warm or cold can, in turn, be referred to the marketing team for continued nurturing through the use of relevant content marketing collaterals such as case studies, whitepapers, and webinars.

Lead Grading can be a powerful way to optimize Marketing Campaigns As Well. Let’s Understand through a small case study example

One of our clients witnessed a dramatic shift in lead quality since they switched to EasyInsights. Previously, they had been distributing leads purely on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Based on a needs analysis, we created a lead grading system that prioritized high-quality leads and automatically allocated them to the best agents. As you can see in the table above, the rate of conversion had improved substantially by February. We could also optimize campaigns for generating better quality leads.

As you can see from the data, lead grading can help you target leads at strategic points along the user journey, increasing conversion potential, and allowing better returns. With EasyInsights, you can conceptualize and execute campaigns with a greater probability of success than before.

EasyInsights Edge In Lead Grading: We are able to rate leads not only based on the actions the user took in that particular session & web property in which he filled the form, but based on all his historic sessions on all your web properties. This generally makes the grading algo much more accurate.

Conclusion

If you are able to grade the leads your are generating based on the behaviour of the user on your website, before filling up the lead form, you can effectively use this to:

1. Optimise your marketing to drive high quality leads.
2. Have crisp clear KPIs for marketing & Sales team to chase. 
3. Increase your lead to conversion ratio by treating high quality leads with more care such as allocating them to seasoned sales rep, sending a different drip to them etc. 
4. Build an incentive structure for sales team where they are paid on the conversion rate that they are able to maintain for different lead grades, and thus make it more motivating for them to put in effort to close every lead allocated to them.

Book a demo! Talk to our product expert to know more about lead grading.