Lead scoring prevents your sales team from wasting their energy on wasteful leads. Furthermore, a good lead scoring system helps your team understand if a particular prospect is most likely to buy, how much they’re going to buy, and when they are going to buy.
Aside from this, you can also use lead scoring to:
- Identify and focus on the leads that need nurturing
- Understand your customers’ behavioral patterns and characteristics
- Track your customer engagement and identify who are the most satisfied
- Refine your messages for each segment
Is Lead Scoring Really for My Business?
As much as lead scoring has a lot of advantages, it does not necessarily mean that it is beneficial for every business.
How do you know if it is what you need at this point?
If the following elements are present, then you need to have a lead scoring system in place.
- You have enough leads — It doesn’t make sense to create a program if you don’t even have enough leads.
- You already have a service level agreement in place — That means your marketing team already knows how much leads they need to pass on to sale every month, and your sales team knows how many leads they should follow up within the same time frame.
- You have enough data — You need two types of data to create a lead scoring program — behavioral and demographic. Behavioral data comes from your analytics and lead management platform. It shows how each lead interacts with your website. Demographic data comes from your lead gen or conversion forms.
Creating a Lead Scoring System that Works
If the assessment above indicates you need a lead scoring system in place, then you need to create one. Let’s start by listing the steps and ingredients for an effective lead scoring program.
Criteria
How do you know if a lead becomes a customer? You should have a list of qualifications that will serve as your guideline. The qualifications might include their age, gender, region, etc. Once you create them, these criteria are already set in stone.
Target Market
These are more specific because they include the qualities and characteristics of your target market. For example, if you are targeting teenagers, what kind of teenagers are they? Are they outgoing? What type of fashion do they like – emo, chic, sporty?
Your goal is to find people who fit the bill of your ideal customer, or people who look like your existing customers.
Your marketing and sales teams most probably have valuable insight to help you draft these qualities. After all, your marketing team does the research who they are while your sales team talks to them every day.
Perfect Lead
What makes one lead better than the other? Is it because they belong to upper management? Is it because they have a certain budget size? Or is it because they arrive at a buying decision much faster than the others? This information allows you to determine how much score each lead should get.
Lead Behavior
How does each lead behave when they visit your website or in your various channels? What do they do before they arrive at a buying decision? List down all the behaviors based on the data you have and assign a point value for each of them.
Lead Scoring System
Once you have identified the characteristics and behaviors of your ideal lead, it’s time to decide what system to use. It can be as simple as using a 1 – 100 scoring scale or something that has additional options but the point is, you have to stick to one system.
Adjustments
A lead system that works gives room for improvement. You should have a regular schedule to review and evaluate your system. Some point worth considering are:
- Low scoring leads that end up converting – what were the steps that led to this?
- High scoring leads but did not convert – what adjustments are needed to prevent this?
These situations are not consistently the same but your goal is to fine-tune your system so you can identify your best leads better. You will always find something new when you take the time to examine these leads closely.
It is also unlikely to create a perfect lead scoring program immediately. But as long as the percentage of prospects who convert are higher than those who do not, that is enough proof that your system is working.
