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3 Ways HubSpot Lead Scoring and Attribution Benefits Your Business
HubSpot is a powerful CRM thanks to its seamless connectivity to marketing automation, sales and customer service.
Perhaps one of the most valuable functions HubSpot offers is lead scoring, which helps sales and marketing teams invest their time in the most likely to convert prospects and better understand their immediate needs.
Professionals in the B2B healthcare technology industry face unique challenges with time and resource-strapped teams. And in healthcare, there’s the added burden of regulations and procedures you must follow.
For these industries, lead scoring can help overworked teams' transition back to strategic, timely and informed professionals with the time and freedom to analyze results, make adjustments and meet their prospects and customers where they are at.
HubSpot connects sales and marketing teams with shared knowledge through alerts and notifications that reduce time-consuming back-and-forth communication and eliminate the risk that interested prospects will fall through the cracks.
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The Challenges Marketing Professionals in the Healthcare Tech Industry Face
Your industry is unlike any other. It’s extremely niche, which requires more customer handholding to earn the sale and often longer sales cycles with several stages in the buying journey.
You’re likely working with a lack of time and resources thanks to lean business principles and a small marketing staff. And let’s not even mention your minuscule marketing budget that you somehow have to show ROI for despite a disconnect between how marketing influences sales.
For you, prioritization is key. Your resources have to go where they’ll do the most good. And that isn’t spending hours each day updating prospects’ statuses in a CRM or sending emails to sales about the prospects who have finished lead nurture series and are primed for a conversation.
Identifying which marketing campaigns are driving the most revenue and which channels are the most effective is nearly impossible due to disparate systems of poor reporting features. And without this information, it’s challenging to know how to optimize your marketing spend and improve your strategy.
You’ve adopted some great technology, but finding the time and resources to fully onboard your team and optimize the use of your marketing technology stack is challenging. Today’s technology is so robust, configuring it to meet your unique needs feels like a full-time job – and let’s be real, it feels like you have three of those already.
Marketing professionals in the B2B healthcare technology industry need a solution to these immense challenges and a way to showcase the value of their marketing efforts. HubSpot lead scoring and attribution can be the solution.
How HubSpot Lead Scoring and Attribution Addresses These Challenges
Instead of devoting one of your marketing team members to managing data within a CRM, allow automation to do it for you. Once you set up your lead scoring criteria within HubSpot, you’ll experience the power and time savings technology optimization can provide.
And once lead scores update automatically based on a prospect or customer’s actions and interests, you can deliver the right content at the right time to earn the sale.
The key is in knowing what actions and interactions show that a customer or prospect is interested in what you have to offer and open to further consideration.
Another perk HubSpot offers busy marketing professionals is attribution reporting. This will tell you with absolute clarity what is working well for your business and where you have opportunities to improve your strategy or test new strategies.
Instead of stopping a strategy because it isn’t working, you’ll have more granular details to adjust and refine your strategy to maximize ROI.
The best part is, you’ll finally have everything you need to showcase the value your marketing team is bringing to the company, and perhaps expand your team accordingly to earn even more sales for the business.
Best Practices for Implementing HubSpot Lead Scoring and Attribution
Now that you understand the importance of quality lead scoring, here’s a look at the ways HubSpot can close existing gaps in your marketing strategy and build seamless transitions to sales.
1. Set Lead Scoring Criteria
This part of the process will take some time and strategy. It isn’t all about configuring HubSpot, but more about taking time to consider your customers and their journey with your organization.
HubSpot offers six lead-scoring models.
- Demographic information: this can be helpful if your audience tends to fall within certain demographics, such as age, parental status, income, etc. You can ask those questions on your forms and landing pages to learn more about your prospects to gauge the likelihood that they’ll buy from you. In most cases, this is less important in B2B industries like yours.
- Company information: B2B industries find this lead scoring model more helpful as you can base it on company size, type and industry. Ask custom questions that help you get deeper into the prospect’s pain points and timelines to better score them as a lead.
- Online behavior: score leads based on what they view online, how long they spend exploring or which offers they download. The more often they frequent your website, the more interested they likely are, and the higher their lead score should be.
- Email engagement: once you’ve met a prospect, you can put them into your lead nurture series and start sending them emails based on where they are in the customer buying journey. Use their engagement with those emails to further update their lead score. Opening and clicking emails can tell you what they are most interested in.
- Social engagement: when a prospect clicks on a social media post or engages with you in some way on those platforms, it offers valuable insights into their interest levels and what they want to learn more about.
- Spam detection: lead scoring isn’t all about increasing scores for the behavior you like. You can also decrease a lead score based on spam criteria, such as no capital letters used in completing a form or awkward language or interactions. That might tell you that this is a bot instead of a real person.
2. Discover What Data Matters
With so many lead scoring criteria options, now you have to decide what is most important. This requires close collaboration with your sales team and a clear understanding of what your customers want and need.
But even once you’ve gathered information from your sales team and customers, you need to look at your analytics to gain a better understanding of what’s most important when evaluating your customers. Discover what makes them most likely to buy from you.
3. Scoring Based on Fit and Interest
Sometimes a straight scoring model isn’t effective. While a customer might be an average fit for your products and services, they might be giving you major signs that they are highly interested.
You don’t want to underscore these potential customers because you’re using a lead scoring model that focuses more on company information and less on website and email interactions.
Using a combination of factors often proves most valuable for B2B companies.
4. Configure Attribution Reporting
To get the most from HubSpot, you’ll also want to set up attribution reporting. This tells you where the customer’s first interaction came from, such as a website form or a social media landing page.
But it goes further than that. You also want to know their last interaction or the interaction that finalized the sale. This allows you to also track metrics like closed-won ratios based on tactics to get a clearer view of what’s working.
Set your interaction sources. These can vary based on the company, but some common ones include:
- Google ad or paid search
- Meeting
- Call
- Sales email
- Marketing email
- Social post
- Offline
- Blog post
- Knowledge base article
- Integrations or extensions
The more you know about your customers and prospects, the more you can make data-driven decisions moving forward.
5. Integrate Your Marketing Technology Stack
HubSpot integrates with a host of marketing technology and tools. That way, you can view analytics all in one place and have a clearer understanding of what’s working. You’ll also reduce wasted time going between programs as you’ll have a central hub for your marketing.
Integrating your technology can be as simple as going to the HubSpot integrations content library and searching for the tools you’re already using. In most cases, you can connect the systems with a few clicks.
Market Using Greater Insights from Automated Lead Scoring and Attribution Models in HubSpot
Experience the difference that a high-quality automation platform with intelligent and customizable lead scoring can have for your organization. Gain greater insights into what’s working through clear attribution to measure ROI by channel and demonstrate your worth.
Contact Diaz & Cooper, a HubSpot Platinum Solution Partner, for a free consultation to learn more about how to leverage HubSpot marketing automations for your business.