Smarter lead scoring: finding the right route to Away From Home sales conversion

Author info

Jasmine Preen

CRM Strategy Lead

You might know your main sales contact. But do you know who really makes your operators’ decisions?

In the Away From Home (AFH) market, gaining visibility and influence over the full buying journey has become increasingly difficult. Rising costs, tighter regulation and tougher competition mean operators’ decisions no longer sit with one person or even one department.

Forrester research finds around 13 people inside a business, and nine outside it, now make up a B2B decision-making unit (DMU). As a result, modern suppliers need to appeal to stakeholders across culinary, procurement, finance, operations, marketing, ownership and more. Tougher still is attribution; finance, legal, and procurement rarely show up in funnels, yet hold roughly 50% of B2B decision-making influence, according to LinkedIn and Bain.

This buying journey fragmentation creates a real challenge. It's no longer enough to identify one contact, assign them a lead score and wait for them to become “sales ready”: vendors are 20 times more likely to be chosen when the entire DMU knows and trusts the brand.

Instead, suppliers need to track buying intent and benchmark a prospect's value so they can show up to the right people in the most relevant way. They need to understand the wider commercial opportunity, recognise buying group signals and decide how best to move that opportunity forward.

So, how do lead scoring models need to get smarter? And how can they determine the best conversion route for each opportunity? Let’s take a look.

Effective lead scoring can reveal the most valuable buying journeys

Scoring individual decision-makers in isolation no longer reflects the reality of AFH. Today, successful engagement requires two connected dimensions: commercial fit and buying intent.

A commercial fit score measures each prospect against their business attributes and determines the likelihood they will convert, based on data from category, sales and existing customer profiles.
A buying intent score measures each prospect based on their engagement with your digital comms, determining their interest and where they are in their buying journey.

Building a commercial fit score involves matching information about individual prospects with the businesses and buying groups around them. Suppliers can then enrich their records with signals like number of sites, purchasing behaviour, estimated commercial potential and more. Together, these signals establish the fit, and help highlight hidden relationships between contacts, accounts and potential decision-makers.

Building a buying intent score requires suppliers to review a prospect’s relevant activity. For instance, have they read one of the brand’s articles, revisited a product page, or requested a sample?

Remember, not every action carries equal weight. A sample request is a stronger buying signal than a single advert click, while repeated engagement from several decision-makers may be more meaningful than intense activity from one. Once tallied, the intent score allows marketing to serve them with the appropriate next step: direct sales contact or further nurturing.

The importance of a connected system

LinkedIn/Bain research shows 40% of B2B deals stall in committee, when a group has to agree. A model that scores one enthusiastic contact tells you nothing about whether the rest of the room is ready.

Fortunately, a dual-pronged approach makes those expanding buying groups reachable, even across different priorities like cost, contractual fit and performance.

Our Brands Away From Home 2 research groups operators into four realities, each responding to a different kind of proof: protecting margin (the Optimiser), managing compliance and risk (the Guardian), chasing differentiation (the Creator), and delivering health without losing margin (the Balancer).

Being able to see early buying intent across departments, and the value of each prospect, enables suppliers to deliver the right message to each and get sales involved at the right time. Buying intent shows how far the opportunity has travelled, commercial fit determines whether it warrants sales time, and the operator reality shapes what the chosen route says.

However, the success of the commercial fit and buying intent framework depends on marketing and sales sharing the same view of an account, its buying group and its recent activity. Without shared tracking and reporting, brands cannot validate leads properly, understand buying signals or coordinate relevant communications. It all leads to outreach that feels inconsistent, seems excessive and misses valuable opportunities.

From disjointed contacts to routed opportunities

For a lead scoring process that's fit for modern AFH, brands need one reliable source of truth.

Omne Connect is our fully managed growth solution. It centralises legacy and future-generated data and validates it against 400,000+ enriched operator profiles across 20+ sectors, each carrying 70+ outlet-level attributes including spend, purchase potential, group structure and social signals. That insight enables brands to score the commercial opportunity around a contact rather than the contact in isolation, then select the most appropriate route for progression according to commercial grade and level of intent.

Journeys are delivered across the channels where the contact is most likely to respond. Campaigns are optimised in real time by testing messaging, creative work and calls to action. Marketing carries out more of the qualification and nurturing process, while sales receives better information and becomes involved when the prospect is genuinely ready for a conversation.

Connected data also improves visibility, cuts manual work and reduces spend on underperforming channels and low-value audiences. As the model learns, teams get faster and more accurate at finding the operators that matter.

Measuring the commercial impact

Ultimately, success is not about more leads, but better opportunities. Stronger scoring improves MQL-to-SQL progression, conversion and sales efficiency. Most Omne Connect clients see better lead quality and sales alignment within 6-8 weeks; after a strategic reset, one of the UK's largest multi-beverage suppliers engaged more than 50 national accounts and delivered over 1,000 qualified leads.

But be clear about the limits. When conversion happens through a wholesaler, suppliers cannot see the final transaction, and no model creates a clean line from click to case sold. A connected system narrows the gap, showing which accounts and stakeholders engaged and which accounts later appeared in depot or wholesaler reporting. Used honestly, it supports confident investment decisions.

As buying journeys grow more complex, brands must identify the best opportunities, choose the right conversion route and equip sales to act at the right moment. Omne Connect makes that possible; and makes marketing mean business.

Ready to discover what your data can tell you?

Start by finding out what your data can already tell you. A discovery session maps your existing contacts against the buying groups behind them, and shows you which opportunities you're sitting on right now. Fully managed, no new hires. Book one here.

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