How to Create a Lead Scoring Process that Gets You More Sales

Oct. 06, 2010

Scoring Leads One of the best ways for marketing and sales teams to coordinate and optimize the lead management process is to implement a lead scoring strategy. With the increasing availability of strong marketing automation platforms there is really no excuse for B2B organizations to ignore the opportunities available through lead scoring.

What is lead scoring?

Lead scoring is adding probability and weight to a web lead based on predetermined criteria and lead behavior when interacting with your website. Essentially, when you score a lead you are rating how likely it is that you think that lead will purchase your product.

If you’re new to the concept, or you’re just looking to optimize your current strategy, here are our top 5 tips for a successful lead scoring system:

Align sales and marketing. Lead scoring is one of the best ways to help reduce the friction between your sales and marketing teams. Involving sales teams in the lead scoring process from the get-go is an excellent way to ensure that the process is performing to the satisfaction of all the teams involved.
Keep it simple. When you set up your process, decide which fields are required and which are optional and keep these minimal and consistent across forms throughout your website to ensure that you’re comparing leads based on the same data. The best way to keep your lead scoring system manageable is to choose lead scoring criteria that can be consistently measured.
Use BANT criteria. If you’re just starting out with lead scoring one of the best things you can do is implement BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) data for your preliminary assessments. This information is often gathered through sales calls and interactions rather than through forms.
Score on both explicit and implicit data. The more information that you have about your leads the more able you are to determine the true value of the lead itself. You can do this by gathering both explicit and implicit data. Explicit data is that which is volunteered when a visitor fills out a web form and interacts with your sales or marketing teams. Implicit data is gathered based on the visitors interactions on your website (click-throughs, email opens, resource downloads etc) It is essential that you evaluate leads based on both types of data so you have a more comprehensive view of the leads' interest.
Remember to score on timing. Don’t forget when your scoring your leads that the frequency of their visits and how recently they’ve interacted with your website is also an important factor in gauging a leads' engagement level.

Bonus tip:

Don’t ignore your rules! Once you've implemented your lead scoring strategy it's important that you don't cheat and send leads to sales that don’t meet the criteria you’ve laid out with your sales teams. That will only sabotage all the work you've done to create a successful process. Remember that lead nurturing is a essential aspect of your lead management process and while a lead may not be ready to buy today (or be handed off to sales) nurturing leads is and

Posted by Amberlie Denny at October 6, 2010 8:15 AM