What’s the most effective way to find customers? Both sales and marketing ponder that question every day, constantly adjusting the width and the length of their conversion funnel.
There is a delicate balance between striving for a large amount of leads overall (e.g. by turning on ad engines) and spending a lot of time finding the most qualified leads manually, one by one.
Today, lead scoring is the most popular solution to this problem. Lead scoring refers to automatically assigning a numerical value to each incoming lead based on how closely they resemble your ICP. Your sales team can then prioritize approaching leads with the highest score, which would result in higher conversion rates compared to picking leads at random.
There are three basic criteria by which lead scoring tools are able to analyze the traffic they process: demographics, company-based, or relationship-based.
Demographics refer to the direct attributes of the lead, such as their position within a company, purchase authority, location, experience, specialization, etc.
Company-based has to do with the specifics of a particular business, such as revenue, number of employees, industry, market positioning, and more.
Relationship-based means there are some other aspects that tie your company to the lead. Maybe they have purchased from you before or they are subscribing to your marketing content.
Nearly all CRMs offer basic lead scoring features based on the contacts you already have, as well as your social media following or email subscribers (first-party data sources). You can also buy access to leads that others have researched themselves (a second-party data source) or aggregated from various platforms (a third-party data source).
Without doubt, lead scoring is instrumental in improving sales conversions across the board, saving your team time and effort they would otherwise spend on pursuing leads that are far from your ideal customer profile.
The Problems with Lead Scoring
Even though lead scoring helps make the sales process better, it’s not without its own issues.
- Incorrect data. The information on leads you get from other platforms can be static, outdated, or simply wrong.
- Unmatched ICP. In a perfect world, assessing any lead against your ideal customer profile would be easy and accurate. In reality, such assessments are often limiting and arbitrary at best.
- No intent to buy. It’s one thing to identify a company and a professional you’d like to sell to. More often than not, however, they would have no desire to purchase your product. It might be the wrong time, they might have other priorities, or they could be pursuing other ideas for developing their company.
In the end, even though lead scoring is a major improvement over cold sales outreach, it doesn’t go far enough to help you capture all the potential value from your leads.
Why Use Buyer Intent Scoring
Lead scoring does bring a lot of value, but when used on its own, it lacks the behavioral component that would tell you whether it’s the best time to reach out to a particular lead. What you need is an accurate buyer intent scoring solution.
Buyer intent scoring takes into consideration the regular lead scoring attributes but also works in real time, tracking how your leads interact with your website, for example, or what they have been searching for before to determine their true interest level at any given moment.
Imagine a lead scanning the web for a database management solution, visiting a few competitors’ websites in the process. If they then come to your website as well and check out the feature and pricing pages, you can assume their buyer intent is quite high, and it would be valuable to reach out to them.
The process described above might seem manual, but what buyer intent solution excels at is scaling that process to every single visitor on your website, mostly by leveraging large third-party data pool sets and the advances in artificial intelligence.
Lift AI is the only buyer intent scoring solution to effectively integrate profile-based lead scoring with real-time behavioral data, giving you the best of both worlds. Lift AI features a proprietary machine-learning model that has been trained on more than one billion third-party data points and 14 million live sales engagements analyzed over a 15-year period.
At the same time, Lift AI is able to evaluate every single visitor on your website and accurately assess their buyer intent, even if they are completely anonymous (up to 98% of them usually are). On average, Lift AI will single out the highest buyer intent visitors, roughly 9% of your overall traffic, with 85% accuracy.
The way Lift AI works is by integrating directly into your enterprise chat platform. Once visitors start to come in, Lift AI would segment them into a few categories, activating direct contact with your BDRs for the highest-scoring ones and using a nurturing bot or a self-help guide for medium and low-scoring visitors.
As a result, Lift AI can help you grow your chat conversions anywhere from two to 10 times in just 90 days.
Try Lift AI now for free for 30 days and see for yourself. To start, you just need to sign up and paste in a small JavaScript code to your website. It’s the perfect example of how both lead and buyer intent scoring can be leveraged to change your chat sales trajectory in no time.
