Should You Be Doing Lead Scoring or Account Scoring?

Lead scoring was introduced to remove the guesswork from lead qualification. But it hasn't always been an effective method of identifying high-potential prospects. With more and more marketers choosing account-based marketing and selling, account scoring has risen in popularity.

Marketers need to choose the right scoring model to make their revenue processes more efficient.

What is lead scoring?

Lead scoring is the process of ranking leads based on their engagement behavior to identify high-quality leads that sales can work on. Sales and marketing teams within a company collectively work on building a lead scoring model by defining what makes a lead a good one.

Profile and engagement criteria are used to score leads. Profile data such as titles, industry, company size and revenue helps identify the lead and ascertain if they have a need for your solution or not.? Engagement data looks at the interaction of a lead with your website and other online activities to determine their interest level towards your product or service.

Developing and implementing an organization-specific lead scoring model enables sales and marketing to determine if a lead can be moved to the sales bucket (SQLs) or needs nurturing.

But, is lead scoring applicable to all businesses? Read on to find out.

Where is lead scoring applicable?

Lead scoring works best for companies that have products or services with low Annual Contract Value (ACV). Low value decisions are taken by users quickly.?

Similarly, companies targeting SMBs will find lead scoring beneficial. Simply because there are fewer decision makers to engage with. So, identifying the correct lead could be the key to enabling the purchase decision.

What happens if your business isn’t targeting SMBs, or your products or services are high ACV?

Things are going the Account-based route

For companies with high ACV products lead scoring isn’t the ideal method. The purchase decisions here are much more complex. These companies also tend to target enterprises more than SMBs largely due to the high purchasing power involved in such deals.

With B2B buying cycles increasingly becoming more complex, marketers are shifting to account-based engagement. Now, sellers are looking at an average buying group size of around 6-7 stakeholders and multiple personas for the enterprise market. This means account scoring is the way forward.

What is Account Scoring?

Account scoring sorts target companies in order of their potential to convert - from the highest to the lowest. Through the account scoring lens, you see opportunities in the form of organizations and not individual leads.

Before selling to a company, it’s ideal to identify if it has the budget or a requirement for your solution. To systematically expedite this process, companies need to develop an Ideal Customer Profile. Once you’ve passed your target accounts through the ICP filter, you can prioritize and segment the most valuable ones through account scoring.

Making the move to account scoring

Practicing account scoring means more than an implement-once-and-done activity. B2B organizations need an intelligent account scoring model. One that continuously updates itself based on real-time engagement data, interests and results. This helps B2B companies remove assumptions from their account scoring process.

At BambooBox, we consider account score as a dynamic value that is collectively driven by the ICP score, intent score and engagement score. So, we leverage AI and ML to build multi-dimensional models to help B2B revenue teams arrive at accurate account scores to run a data-driven account qualification process.

Read the full article here to understand the nuances that distinguish the application of lead scoring and account scoring.