A lot of lead scoring models focus on the neutral and the positive. The first steps are usually just information gathering: your marketers collect a company’s specifics, industry information, contact names, and the rest of what your company needs to fill out a basic profile.
Then models focus on the good. Are they subscribers? How many phone calls are there? Are they regularly interacting with your site? If your contact is someone with a lot of purchasing power and they have a good relationship with your go-to salesperson, then that’s even better news.
But if your lead scoring metric only focuses on the positives, your sales department is going to have a lot of unpleasant surprises when they start forecasting. Make sure to include the negatives, too.
What negative data should you include in your lead scoring?
A lot of different things can tip you off that a client should get a lower score than the positive news seems to indicate. Make sure to include:
A lead’s lack of responsiveness
Whether your leads start in a formal marketing department or they’re sent straight to sales, there’s going to be a lot of unanswered messages. Even good leads won’t answer you all the time, so don’t score each attempt to reach out too heavily. But if your lead doesn’t respond to emails, phone calls, or offers, then their score should drop drastically.
If there’s no way to control their movement through the sales pipeline, they aren’t a good lead.
How many blank fields are in their account information page
Just like lack of responsiveness, lack of information is bad news. If you can’t find a specific content, or the lead doesn’t have much of an established online presence, you need to judge accordingly. They might be an excellent customer over time, but you don’t have enough information to rely on that.
No matter what sours a lead for your company, make sure it’s part of the final score. Even if it makes the average lead look like more effort, it’s better to set everyone’s expectations up front. Contact us for tactics to make even unpromising leads better conversions.