While generating leads is an essential goal for all healthcare suppliers, qualified leads that convert are critical to a company’s success. Knowing where prospects are in the sales journey— whether they’re motivated to buy or are at the right time for a follow-up— helps build a reliable sales pipeline.
Lead scoring in healthcare provides useful insights to help you rate your sales leads for a more efficient and effective sales process. An effective lead scoring qualification model can help you hone in on qualified leads with a higher likelihood of completing a sale. This allows you to increase sales and grow your business faster.
Lead Scoring in Healthcare and Why It’s Important
Lead scoring in healthcare enables you to gather data for a particular lead and use that information to assign it a point value. Typical models use a scale of 0 (least qualified) to 100 (most qualified) to determine which leads are most engaged with your brand. The more you learn about each lead, and the more they interact with your business, the higher their score should rise.
Lead scores rely on five main data points:
- Demographics: Qualitative and quantitative information, from age and gender to purchase behavior and job title, guide campaign strategy and retention efforts.
- Business details: Company size and revenue can impact the language you use to communicate with your prospects as well as the products and price points you promote to them.
- Online presence: Monitor chats and discussions on websites and social network forums. Look for pain points and opportunities to solve their problems with your products.
- Social network: If your leads are on social media, consider communicating with them in a more casual, conversational format to build a deeper, meaningful relationship.
Once leads achieve a particular point threshold, they are deemed qualified and can be directed to the sales department. When a sales team receives a notification about a qualified lead, they follow up to help convert the prospect to a customer.
The insights you gain from lead scoring and the process of qualifying leads are critical to your success. The more you know about your prospects, the more you can do to create a positive customer experience for them while guiding them through the sales funnel. From customized messaging to useful promotions and educational materials, understanding your audience gives you the leverage you need to build trust, rapport, and solidify brand loyalty for sales growth.
7 Tips for Building an Effective Lead Scoring Qualification Model
For the most effective results, lead scoring should be accurate and consistent. Use the information gathered from the lead scoring data qualifiers to develop a model that follows these seven guidelines.
1. Establish Your Minimum Criteria
Determine what you require from a lead before they can become a customer. These steadfast qualifications could be age, location, or job title. Maybe you only sell to people in hospital distribution or group purchasing networks. Whatever the criteria, it must be essential to passing them through the funnel. Otherwise, it shouldn’t be considered here.
2. Identify Your Target Market
Identify the characteristics of your target market. Unlike your minimum criteria, these are common traits typically held by your preferred audience but are not mandatory. The goal is to identify prospects that are most similar to your existing customers. The more comparable they are, the more likely they are to be interested in your products.
This is a simple process if you’re familiar with your current customers. If not, your marketing team should know these characteristics from their research in developing custom content. You can also rely on your sales team for input since they encounter your audience daily and are in touch with your customers’ needs.
3. Define the Ideal Customer
In a perfect world, what does your dream customer look like? Think about traits like job title, field of expertise, typical turnaround demand, and budget size. Seek input from your sales and marketing teams to build a more well-defined snapshot of your ideal lead. Once you know what your desired customer looks like, your leads can achieve a higher score.
4. Assess Customer Engagement
Understanding customer behavior is crucial in assigning point values. Consider all of the opportunities a prospect has to engage with your company.
Assess behavior such as:
- Website clicks
- Email opens
- File downloads
- Social media comments
- Completed CTAs
Evaluate website analytics to find such details and observe customer behavior. Critical conversion behaviors, like requesting more information or watching a product demonstration, are indicators that a lead is interested in becoming a customer. The score for these behaviors should carry more weight when you begin assigning points.
5. Set the Parameters for Your Scoring System
Although a scoring system of 0-100 is straightforward and widely accepted, incorporating more digits in your structure can help categorize your leads. Consider adding a thousandth digit to signify company size. Weed out weak leads by assigning a certain number of points for leads that meet your essential criteria. If they don’t meet the threshold for quality, they don’t make it to the sales team.
6. Assign Points
The point of lead scoring is to identify characteristics and actions that result in a closed sale. Assign points to behaviors accordingly. It is rare that a lead who registers for blog updates becomes a paying customer. That behavior should earn a low score. Leads who click on downloadable files do tend to convert, so they should get a higher score.
7. Adjust as Necessary
Once you’ve determined your scoring system, try it out for a month. Then reassess and see how effective it’s been. Look for any surprises, like low-scoring leads that converted and high-scoring leads that didn’t. Make adjustments to your system as necessary until you develop a model that yields positive results.
Let Us Help You Build an Effective Lead Scoring and Qualification Model
All businesses in the healthcare supply chain can benefit from an effective lead scoring and qualification model. With this model, you can target the prospects most likely to convert and allocate your resources most effectively. Share Moving Media specializes in helping healthcare businesses generate qualified leads and reach their marketing goals for increased market share.
Contact us today to discuss how we can help you close sales and generate revenue with an effective lead scoring and qualification model.