A lead scoring system is necessary for your marketing team to be able to qualify and prioritize the best leads for the sales teams to then pursue. The specific criteria used for scoring will vary from business to business, and will depend on factors that are important to each industry. For example, if your B2C target market is small-to-medium sized businesses, a company of 3,500 employees may not score well against your lead qualification process.

Although lead scoring has fast become a popular and useful strategy in many businesses, many others have no idea where to begin…until now! Follow this 3-step framework to design and implement your own lead scoring strategy.

Step 1: Is Lead Scoring Right for Your Business?

If your sales team is lacking in leads to begin with, then there’s not much need for you to read any further. Instead of implementing lead scoring to help you qualify your leads, your marketing team should be focusing on its lead generation efforts instead.

Also, you need to be able to collect and understand information from incoming leads as well, in order to implement a successful lead scoring system:

• Demographic information: including details like a lead name, email address or company size, this information can be collected via website form submissions
• Lead intelligence: comes from tracking digital behaviour of website visitors through analytics software, like Google Analytics

If your website doesn’t have the ability to track these two areas of information, then you won’t have the right data on hand to begin scoring leads.

Step 2: Define Your Criteria

Next, you need to define what exact criteria makes for a qualified lead. Remember, a qualified lead is one you’ve collected enough information (demographic and lead intelligence) about to determine if it’s more likely to become a customer, in comparison to other leads. So by understanding the qualities of a qualified lead, you can then assign a point-score to each of these qualities…and your lead scoring system will be born!

Do you have any minimum requirements? For example, if you own an alcohol business, perhaps your market is restricted to those of legal age. Or if you only sell within Canada, your market is restricted regionally as well.

Who is your target market? What qualities does that target usually possess? What demographics are typically present when your ideal customer makes a purchase? Are they VP-level executives?  Are they from a certain industry? Is their business of a certain size?

What behaviours are common prior to a conversion? Review your analytics data from a recent conversion: what happened during the buyer’s journey? Did they request a demo or download a whitepaper? Did they review a specific product or services page? Did they request specific information about a product or service? How long did they stay on your site before making a purchase, and what pages did they visit?

Step 3: Assign Point-Scores

Once you’ve identified a series of qualities and criteria to score future leads against, you need to come up with a point-scoring system to value each of them. Most companies typically use a 1 to 100 value range, with 1 being “least ready to convert” and 100 being “most ready to convert”.

For example, if your ideal customer is a VP-level contact at a small-to-medium sized business (up to 150 employees), then a “VP, Marketing from a company of 100 employees lead” might be scored a 50; whereas an “Intern from a Fortune-500 company of 1,500 employees lead” might score a 1.

Since all of a lead’s points will be added up together to form one final lead score total, you’ll need to define the level at which a lead’s score is high enough to be sent to your sales team for follow-up. Going through previous conversions will help you to assign a minimum score at which a purchase occurred, and you can use this figure in your sales hand-offs going forward.

Conclusion:

It may sound easy enough to set-up a lead scoring system through excel spreadsheets or your current CRM, but if your business is inundated with leads on a regular basis, it might be time for you to look into lead management software. These tools will help you to set your lead scoring criteria and will auto-score all of your incoming leads in real-time. They can even automatically forward those leads with high enough scores right to your sales teams, all through your CRM.

To gain an even deeper understanding of the buyer’s journey and how to transform your lead and sales process with Inbound Sales, download a copy of our free guide, Buyers Speak Out.