Every step your business makes should be in the direction of securing or maintaining customers. Even though data science has thrown this into sharp relief, that need has always demanded a standardized process. But customers don’t start off as consumers near the end of their buyer’s journey. You have to have a lead scoring process to move leads up on your priority list and through your sales funnel. The best way to build it is to work backward:

1. Identify your customer personas.

Who do you want to sell to? While you are going to sell to a lot of diverse groups, focus on the candidates that are proven to be both your most frequent buyers and your most profitable buyers. Once you know who you need to sell to, you can collect data such as the best venues for communicating with them, how much time they typically need to make purchase decisions, and their typical spending patterns.

2. Start to identify pressure points.

Whether you sell to businesses or to individual consumers, everyone is on a deadline. You can take into consideration the seasonality of your products, such as a landscaping service in autumn or financial consulting in January. This is where you start to pull in specific information based on visitors and leads.

3. Look into your visitors’ behaviors. 

If your site is integrated with a data analysis tool like Google Analytics, you can see how users interact with your site on a very specific level. See what percentage of leads have interacted with your site three times, which makes them prime candidates for conversion. Or use an automated email tool to score subscribers’ likelihood of becoming paying customers.

No matter what factors you build into your lead scoring model, make sure you can get concrete answers and that you can always refine your scoring model as you get a larger pool of customer data. Contact us to get started.