Telemarketing Software Featured Article

In today's digital world, sales and marketing have become important because businesses have to reach out to the right people at the right time to sell their products and services. Identifying target customers is difficult because of the virtual nature of the Internet, so businesses employ many strategies to identify potential customers. One such strategy is lead generation and scoring.

Lead generation is the process by which potential customers are identified based on the interest they show toward a particular product. These customers, also called leads, fill out a page with their details and consent to be contacted by companies selling similar products or services. However, these leads alone will not improve the marketability of the product because a lot of aspects continue to remain unknown. Therefore, it is important to give scores to the leads based on certain factors such as age, location and gender to get more value out of it. Such a process of assigning scores to leads is called lead scoring. The goal of lead scoring is to identify which customers are ready to move to sales, without leaving the rest behind. Other leads that are not yet ready should be nurtured using a different set of strategies.

Lead scoring should begin with identifying a set of implicit and explicit factors that determine the quality and readiness of the lead. Some examples of explicit factors include location, age, gender and industry, while implicit factors revolve around user behavior, and include factors such as the amount of time spent on filling the form, the number of clicks made and the number of times the lead has visited a page. Based on these factors, scores should be given to leads.

To be successful in lead scoring, it is important to have a clear system in place that would weigh the factors and categories to establish scores and determine how data relate to each other, according to Chiefmarketer.com.  Such a system is essential to convert the leads to loyal customers.