Everything You Need to Know About B2B Lead Scoring

You've carried out a successful B2B lead generation campaign and gained hundreds of engaged and relevant new leads.

You might be thinking it's time to call them - right? However, it may be hold fire on passing them straight to your sales team. You need to nurture your leads – and to do that, you might find B2B lead scoring really useful. 

Lead scoring is a way of measuring your leads' engagement with your brand. It can really boost your B2B lead nurturing strategy, allowing you to see exactly how well your nurturing strategies are working. And it can dramatically increase the ROI of your lead generation campaign.

In this blog, we'll cover: 

• What is B2B lead scoring? 
• Examples and B2B lead scoring best practices 
• How to nurture B2B leads 
• The best B2B lead nurturing strategies

What Is B2B Lead Scoring? 

Lead scoring gives you a way to identify and focus on the leads that are most likely to convert first. 

In 2024, most technology buyers are doing their own research, searching for solutions to their business needs independently of salespeople. B2B businesses are now more dependent on buyers becoming aware of them online, and building on that awareness till it's time to buy. Lead nurturing, and lead scoring, are vital parts of that process. 

The many benefits of lead scoring include: 

• Knowing exactly where leads are in the marketing funnel, and how qualified they are.
• Being able to see the ways in which your lead has engaged with you, whether that's opening an email, liking a social media post, reading a web page or downloading a piece of syndicated content.
• Using that information to personalize and target your communications in line with your account-based marketing strategy.
• Choosing which types of content they're likely to engage with next.
• Focusing your marketing efforts on the strongest leads first. 

According to HubSpot, around 10% of leads will typically convert into customers. Of course, that number completely depends on the type of B2B lead generation campaigns you run, the quality of your leads, and the specialist suppliers you work with.

Side note: Use our ungated Quality Lead Generation Checklist to ensure you only work with transparent suppliers to generate relevant and engaged leads (something we're very passionate about at Headley Media!)

The idea behind lead scoring is to use a points system. You assign each lead a numerical value which corresponds to how ready the lead is to make a purchase.

Within your B2B lead scoring strategy you will also decide a threshold number of points and the follow-up action. For example, a score of 100 points may mean the lead is flagged to your sales team, or it may mean the lead receives an invitation to a free trial or demo. 

The key with B2B lead scoring is to automate as much of the process as possible, for example by aligning your Sales and Marketing CRM systems to automatically flag when a lead reaches the agreed score.

By comparing each lead's score against the maximum possible score, you can easily see which leads are ready to be passed to your sales team. 

The important thing to recognize is your B2B lead scoring strategy should feed into your lead nurturing program. Lead nurture through the marketing funnel is boosted by lead scoring, allowing you to measure how well nurtured each lead is, and how well your nurturing is working.

We really like the following video from our friends at HubSpot, which explains B2B lead scoring well: 

How to do Lead Scoring for B2B 

It's simple, really: Once you've generated your leads, you should score them by adding points for any positive behaviors they show. 

Don't forget you can subtract points as well: if your lead is in a geographical area you don't sell to, for example, you can assign them minus points, or you may decide to remove them from your lead nurture setup completely.

You can also do this for negative behaviors, such as unsubscribing from your emails or unfollowing you on social media. 

Here are some different criteria you can use to score your leads: 

1. Scoring Their Behavior

Scoring leads based on their behavior is the most common lead-scoring strategy. Their behavior includes emails opened or clicked, website pages viewed, and content downloaded.

You'll decide the number of points to allocate to each activity, based on the value of the information.

For example, if a lead visits your pricing page there's a higher chance they're thinking about your solutions than someone reading a 'beginner's guide' to your product or solution, so you'd allocate a higher score.

2. Scoring Your Leads' Contact Information

It may sound obvious, but your lead's business name and job title are big indicators of whether they might buy your product. You can also get a lot of information from an email address: assign a negative lead score for a Gmail or Yahoo email address.

At Headley Media we don't allow leads to give a personal email address, boosting the quality and relevance of our leads from the start.

Optional fields filled out indicate a warmer interest, too. Did they provide a cell phone number as well as a business phone, even though they didn't have to? Add some points. 

3. Assigning Points for Extra Information

Use audience intelligence strategies to glean extra business or demographic information from your leads.

For example, our technology clients often choose to include profiling questions or BANT qualifying questions, to which you can assign a lot of potential points. 

Information on the size of the business or the geographical area it serves will also likely affect the lead score because this information is super useful for your sales teams, and often a pretty instant indication of whether or not the lead will make a good client.

Hear from Headley Media's Senior Account Manager, Laura Harwood and Head of Marketing, Chloe Addis, as they chat about the power of profiling questions, and other audience intelligence strategies, below!  

4. Using Intent Data to Score Your Leads

Your lead generation supplier can help you gain further insight into your leads' behaviors, by supplying you with information that indicates they are actively researching topics that relate to your product or solution.

For example at Headley Media, we track buyer intent through all the content our technology audiences read on our content library websites, cross-referenced with 3^rd party data.

Our technology clients then use this information to tailor their follow-up communications based on their new leads' search intent.

5. Using Data Collected From Your Own Website & Social Media

How often a lead clicks on certain pages of your website – and which pages – gives great insight into how close they are to purchasing. Lots of views or clicks on key pages such as your product or pricing pages, for example, tell you a lot. You're also likely to get more insight from the resources they've used on your website. 

Where possible, you could also score your leads based on how well they engage with your social media pages. For example, clicks, shares, and comments are all worth points. If they've shared or liked your posts multiple times, you can give them a bigger score because they're more likely to be engaged than if they'd liked once. The tricky part here is automating the process and getting your CRM systems to talk to each other.

How Lead Scoring Fits into Your B2B Lead Nurturing Strategy 

What is lead nurturing? We’ll tell you: it’s the vital process of ensuring your leads stay interested in your brand and products. 

It's a longer-term strategy of continually engaging your leads, often via email but with display advertising, social media and content syndication too, to raise your leads' awareness of your brand and ensure you are front of mind as they move down the marketing funnel towards a purchase. 

B2B lead scoring allows you to measure their interest over time, so you can personalize your nurturing according to what they need, and contact your lead at the right time for them. 

At Headley Media, we generate leads based on our technology audiences engaging with our clients' content. If our client then either cold-calls them immediately or leaves them to be dealt with later, they're unlikely to ever convert and a huge opportunity will have been wasted. 

According to Oracle, 80% of leads that aren't ready to buy now make a purchase within the next 24 months. 

The key to B2B lead nurturing is to build momentum without overwhelming your leads, and to feed them useful, relevant information to help them in their business. So that when it's time for them to buy, they think of you first. 

B2B Lead Nurturing Best Practices 

There are three golden rules of lead nurturing: 

• Speedy follow-up. Aim to get in contact with your new leads as soon as possible to avoid lead decay. Initial follow-up emails have an enviably high open rate, so harness their power! 
• Use a balanced mix of comms. We recommend starting your lead nurturing strategy with email and social media nurture. Modern buying committees rely heavily on 'self-serve' research, so calling your leads comes way down the line, towards the bottom of the funnel.
• Prioritize their needs first. Focus on providing valuable, educational, and useful content to start with, weaving in information about your company, products, and services once your new contacts are more familiar with your brand. 

As well as following these lead nurturing tactics, we recommend lots of patience. Keep momentum going with a welcome email, and aim to send messages regularly without overwhelming them. 

If your lead generation is based on content syndication – as it would be if you chose to work with Headley Media – you can use that content in your lead nurturing campaign. 

Send them more content: something that complements their initial content download, or that's useful to them. What did the content downloaded by the lead say? You can pick out key themes of that content and turn them into nurture emails, or share more relevant insights on the topic.

B2B Lead Nurturing Strategies 

B2B lead scoring and lead nurturing can be tricky to get the hang of, but they're so important to ensure your marketing budget is being used effectively and potential customers who actually want to hear from you, are hearing from you. 

Using lead nurturing software and suppliers can make it much easier. At Headley Media, we offer Nurture Track and SoftBANT strategies that ensure leads are familiarized with your brand before we deliver them to you. Our B2B lead generation services expose your leads to multiple pieces of your syndicated content, gaining their explicit consent to hear from you throughout the process.

Using content syndication platforms is our favorite method of B2B lead generation. We promote your content to our millions-strong audiences in the IT, cybersecurity, HR, fintech, martech, and electronics industries, via our user-friendly content libraries. Our loyal readers become your leads. 

Content syndication lends itself to the best B2B lead nurturing strategies: it's based on your best content, such as useful whitepapers, eBooks, research reports, and case studies, that readers will happily give their contact details to read. 

Looking for more advice on lead nurturing? Download our free B2B lead nurturing toolkit, which includes advice and templates for both your Sales and Marketing teams.