Lead Scoring is an integral part of Lead Management that ultimately results in higher conversion rates. With lead scoring, your company will attach numeric values to each of your prospects based on a number of criteria including: their professional designation, demographic qualities, psychographic qualities, as well as their specific behaviors on your websites or how they react to your marketing emails. This ranking technique helps your company manage a high volume of leads, by separating the quality leads from the people who are just window shopping.

Prioritizing Leads

Lead scoring allows you to identify which prospects are most interested in your products or services. Also, more importantly, it gives you a valuable tool to manage your sales efforts by helping you identify which prospects deserve more of your time and attention. However, your company can’t utilize a Lead Scoring system until your Marketing and Sales team agree on the definition of a “qualified lead.” Once your organization has reached a consensus, Marketing can focus on generating qualified leads and Sales can focus on closing deals. For instance, recently you’ve sent out your latest email newsletter. Your web analytics tracks that one person opened your email and then visited your pricing page 20 times in the last three days. It also shows another person opened an email, downloaded a white paper, and then booked a live demo with your staff all within twenty minutes. Which of these leads should sales call first? Is a visitor that books a live demo as qualified as a visitor to your pricing page? In another instance, you might rank a VP-level prospect who has spent time on both your products and pricing page higher than an intern or administrator with the same behavior. Or you might rank one VP over another, if the first VP demonstrates a higher level of engagement on your site. In either case it helps to have an objective system for ranking that will allow your team to make quick decisions.

Ranking Criteria

The most accurate lead scoring models include both explicit and implicit information. Explicit scores are based on “fit” or information provided about (or by) the prospect that illustrate how closely they align with your target market. For instance, company size, industry segment, job title, and geographic location will affect a lead’s score and how likely they are to buy your product. Implicit scores are based on lead engagement and are derived from monitoring prospect behavior. For instance web page visits, white paper downloads, and email opens or clicks affect a lead’s score. Another, newer, score criteria is the “social score”.  This score predicts whether a lead is qualified based on their activities and engagement on social networks. Isolating these two dimensions will allow your teams to create a lead scoring table. In a simple example you might use A, B, C, and D to rate a prospect’s specific demographic qualities in the columns of your table. In conjunction, you might use 1, 2, 3, and 4 to rate a lead’s engagement up the rows of your table. Then you may categorize your prospects by cross-referencing each cell. You should also define a specific action for each square in the grid. Obviously, A1 leads, the most qualified, should be directed to Sales. Alternately, A4 leads, which are the right demographic “fit”, but have minimal engagement, would require a different strategy that allows them to be nurtured over time.

Adjusting Lead Scoring Overtime

It is important to remember that with each action a lead takes, his score should change. That’s why it’s necessary that a re-scoring process is automatically triggered on a regular, preferably daily, basis. You should look for marketing automation software that meets these requirements. Contact us today, to learn more about how lead nurturing and scoring can boost your business!