Lead scores help your salespeople prioritize their customers. While it would be nice to reach out to every customer and maximize sales, sometimes there just isn’t time for it. Near the end of the quarter, everyone needs to focus on the most likely sales and the sales that require the least personal attention. Some leads also linger in the pipeline and, while they’re interested in your company’s projects, there’s little sign of momentum.
How can you start to take difficult timelines into consideration?
Make time part of your lead scoring model. You might already include deadlines into your model, since different business leads need their products at a set point in the year. General events like EOY budget deadlines, the holidays, and fiscal years also change lead behavior. The same lead that’s in the green in December might be yellow in January.
Another important aspect of time is duration. If someone has been in the sales pipeline for a long time, that might not necessarily be a bad thing. As long as there is measurable movement, it’s just a slow sale. But once the movement stalls, you need to start marking down the lead’s score. Even if the entire process is automated, you can’t count on a closed deal within any estimated time frame.
The third important time factor is how much time your salespeople are sinking into the lead. If the client requires a lot of hand-holding or demos, that cuts into how good the lead is. Even if they’re likely to buy your products within a given quarter, if they take the time of two or three sales, they’re not as good of a lead.
Whether timelines, deadlines, or energy intensiveness have the priority in your company’s lead scoring model, you can’t let scores sit. Go to Predictive Response for more tools and tactics for scores that help your sales department close deals on time.