Lead Scoring: Discover the best practices to segment and classify your website's potential customers

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You already know that one of the great advantages of Inbound Marketing is the opportunity to attract a large number of leads to your company. But even if you already have a strategy in place and the leads are coming in, you still have another challenge ahead of you: qualifying each one of them.

Without proper qualification, your sales team will waste time with people who are not ready to buy and you will have a bigger job generating new leads.

This is why lead scoring exists, a technique that advertising database helps increase the efficiency of Inbound Marketing and makes the companies that apply it more solid.

Do you want to know how lead scoring works? Then keep reading, because we are going to show you right now!

What is lead scoring?
What types of classifications does lead scoring cover?
What is the importance of lead scoring for your business?
What criteria can be analyzed to perform lead scoring?
6 steps to lead scoring perfection
6 mistakes that are often made when it comes to lead scoring
After lead scoring, what should you do?
The innovative role of interactivity in lead scoring
5 useful tools for a more complete lead scoring
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is, in simple terms, a way of classifying your potential customers by points. These points are used to determine who is ready to buy or not.

Once a lead receives a score that is deemed acceptable by the company, it is passed on to the sales team to try to close the deal.

This score is defined based on the lead's profile compared to the company's persona and also by their actions during the purchasing journey .

Therefore, the closer the lead profile is to your established persona, the more points they earn.

At the same time, their actions (such as downloading rich materials, answering surveys, etc.) also count points, as they indicate interest in your message.

What types of classifications does lead scoring cover?
There are three types of leads that are quite popular when we talk about their proximity to the moment of making the purchase decision and their compatibility with the profile of the company's ideal client.

Information-Qualified Leads (IQL)
IQLs, or Information Qualified Leads, are leads that fit the profile of your ideal customer and who, despite having provided you with personal information, have not yet shown real interest in your specific solution.

It could be a lead who is interested in the topics you cover and has downloaded an ebook, for example, but who is not yet interested in purchasing.

This type of lead will only have greater value for you if they have other interactions that show you that they are evolving and maturing towards the purchasing process .

Marketing-Qualified Leads (MQL)
MQLs, or marketing qualified leads , are those who find in your brand a solution to satisfy a need they already have. In other words, they are already showing interest in what you can offer them.

They may have been converted by downloading an ebook that tells you that you have the solution to solve their problem and that with the material they have downloaded, they also know it.

Sales-Qualified Leads (SQL)
SQLs are sales qualified leads. In other words, they are leads that are ready to buy your product or service and if they receive an offer in the right way, they are more likely to accept it.

One of the actions that tells you that a lead is an SQL is free trials and demos.

If a potential customer requests a trial of a product or service, it's a great indicator that they're ready to buy.

These are the leads that can become future clients, however, there are also cold leads that are those that do not fit the profile of your ideal client nor are they interested in your products or services now or will be in the future.