In business-to-business (B2B) companies, marketing and sales teams face significant challenges in identifying, qualifying, and prioritizing a large number of leads. Lead prioritization is a critical task for B2B organizations because it allows them to allocate resources more effectively, focus their sales force on the most viable and valuable opportunities, optimize their time spent qualifying leads, and maximize their B2B digital marketing strategies. This article addresses the topic by presenting a case study of a B2B software company's development of a lead scoring model based on data analytics and machine learning under the consumer theory approach. The model was developed using real lead data generated between January 2020 and April 2024, extracted from the company's CRM, which were analyzed and evaluated by fifteen classification algorithms, where the results in terms of accuracy and ROC AUC showed a superior performance of the Gradient Boosting Classifier over the other classifiers. At the same time, the feature importance analysis allowed the identification of features such as “source” and “lead status,” which increased the accuracy of the conversion prediction. The developed model significantly improved the company's ability to identify high quality leads compared to the traditional methods used. This research confirms and complements existing theories related to understanding the application of consumer behavior theory and the application of machine learning in the development of B2B lead scoring models. This study also contributes to bridging the gap between marketers and data scientists in jointly understanding lead scoring as a critical activity because of its impact on overall marketing strategy performance and sales revenue performance in B2B organizations.

The global big data market is forecasted to grow to 103 billion U.S. dollars by 2027, more than double its expected market size in 2018. With a share of 45 percent, the software segment would become the large big data market segment by 2027.

What is Big data?

Big data is a term that refers to the kind of data sets that are too large or too complex for traditional data processing applications. It is defined as having one or some of the following characteristics: high volume, high velocity or high variety. Fast-growing mobile data traffic, cloud computing traffic, as well as the rapid development of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) all contribute to the increasing volume and complexity of data sets.

Big data analytics

Advanced analytics tools, such as predictive analytics and data mining, help to extract value from the data and generate new business insights. The global big data and business analytics market was valued at 169 billion U.S. dollars in 2018 and is expected to grow to 274 billion U.S. dollars in 2022. As of November 2018, 45 percent of professionals in the market research industry reportedly used big data analytics as a research method.

The global big data and business analytics (BDA) market was valued at 168.8 billion U.S. dollars in 2018 and is forecast to grow to 215.7 billion U.S. dollars by 2021. In 2021, more than half of BDA spending will go towards services. IT services is projected to make up around 85 billion U.S. dollars, and business services will account for the remainder. Big data High volume, high velocity and high variety: one or more of these characteristics is used to define big data, the kind of data sets that are too large or too complex for traditional data processing applications. Fast-growing mobile data traffic, cloud computing traffic, as well as the rapid development of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) all contribute to the increasing volume and complexity of data sets. For example, connected IoT devices are projected to generate 79.4 ZBs of data in 2025. Business analytics Advanced analytics tools, such as predictive analytics and data mining, help to extract value from the data and generate business insights. The size of the business intelligence and analytics software application market is forecast to reach around 16.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2022. Growth in this market is driven by a focus on digital transformation, a demand for data visualization dashboards, and an increased adoption of cloud.