When it comes to marketing and sales outreach, the general wisdom is that the closer you are to targeting an audience of ideal customers, the more likely you are to convert them. The more you convert, the more money you make. This seems pretty straightforward – if you can figure out who your ideal customers are.

Segmentation or lead scores?

Segmentation is one way to categorize customers for more focused targeting, but it’s easier said than done because there are many ways to categorize customers – from demographics to psychographics to geography (and so much more).

In our experience, the most efficient and effective way to segment customers in order to maximize profit potential is by lead scores. How do you define a lead score? A very basic definition is this: It’s a number assigned to a customer that reflects the likelihood they will act in response to a specific message or product offering. The higher the number, the higher the likelihood the customer will engage – and buy.

A customer’s lead score can also change, based on the product or message. When we work with clients we ask them to be very specific about the goal they want to achieve with a specific product or campaign. If the goal is to upsell customers on a new product, we will want to identify potential leads more likely to purchase sooner than those who are likely to wait (for a variety of reasons).

Lead scores and the buyer’s journey

The approach to converting early adopters won’t be the same as nurturing late adopters and moving the latter group into a “consideration” stage. Late adopters need more time, more evidence, and likely a drop in price before they’ll act. To no one’s surprise, they won’t be ideal customers if you launch a new product. So how do you identify early adopters?

Predicting behavior to focus efforts

Lead scores can “predict” which customers are likely to take action and those who won’t. Here’s an example: If a sales team can predict who is likely to respond to a cold call or an email, it follows that they can prioritize who to target to optimize their time and increase sales. If you’ve never thought lead scores could make a difference, I’m here to tell you that we’ve seen them work for our clients.

I won’t get into the specifics about how the Wrench lead score algorithm works, but I will say that we’ve made it easy for clients to upload contact and customer lists via a CSV file or a CRM integration. Wrench’s web app provides a straightforward method for uploading product or brand descriptions. From there, the Wrench platform quickly generates lead scores so a marketing or sales team can quickly prioritize who to target.

Lead scores make the most of customer data

Using lead scores, one of our clients found that only 17% of the contacts in their database fit their customer profile. This insight gave the client the information they needed to prioritize high-scoring contacts that were more likely to convert, saving them time and resources. Put another way, if you knew which 20% of your customers were likely to convert, you would know where to spend more of your time and attention and see results faster. Wrench’s Lead Score AI feature can increase a conversion rate up to 5x, and in a highly competitive landscape, this can be a significant advantage.