We all want more leads. But too often, we get so caught up in producing a high volume of leads that we lose sight of their quality. The reality is that it doesn’t matter if you bring in thousands of leads a week if none of them ever convert.
Having too many unqualified leads make their way into your sales pipeline not only wastes time, but it lowers morale, too. If only you could be strategic about what leads you choose to engage with.
Enter lead scoring — the solution to help you qualify leads more strategically.But exactly what is lead scoring? Let’s take a closer look and explore how you can get started with lead scoring in your company.
What is Lead Scoring?
Simply put, lead scoring involves assigning your leads a numerical value based on how likely they are to turn into potential customers. A lead scoring system is a straightforward and unbiased way to qualify your leads and separate high-quality leads from time-wasting ones.
The process involves awarding predetermined points based on specific demographic characteristics or behaviors. For example, they might get:
- 100 points for following you on social media
- 100 points for matching your industry preferences
- 100 points for matching company size preferences
- 150 points for each time they visited your website
- 150 points for spending more than a few minutes on your website
- 200 points for opening your email newsletter
- 200 points for talking with your website’s chatbot
- 250 points for downloading an eBook
- 300 points when multiple contacts from the same company visit
- 750 points for signing up for a free trial
Once a lead reaches a specific value, it becomes qualified. Sticking with the same example, you might determine that once leads reach 500, they become marketing qualified (referred to as MQLs) and are sent to a marketing funnel for more nurturing, and once they reach 750 they become sales qualified (called SQLs) and are sent to the sales team to close.A lead scoring system helps you qualify your leads based on activity that matters to your company, so you don’t waste any time working on leads that aren’t likely to close. It also allows your team to focus on prospects that are the most primed for the pitch.
4 Steps to Start Lead Scoring
Here are four steps to get started with lead scoring in your company:
1. Determine Your Data Points
The first step is to determine what behaviors and activities are important to your company and lead to higher quality leads. Consider things like:
- Demographic/Company information (industry, size, revenue, location, etc.)
- Position within the company (CEO, HR, information gatherer, etc.)
- Behaviors (Website visits, website duration, visits to high-value pages, downloads, demos, etc.)
- Engagement (email opens, social media follows, ad clicks, etc.)
If you aren’t sure how to figure these things out, there are a couple of options. Start by looking at your historical sales and marketing data to see if you can determine what behaviors and characteristics your high-quality leads have in common. Then, ask your sales team what types of information help them determine whether they have a good lead on the phone. When in doubt, you can always reference your target audience or buyer personas, too.
2. Assign Points Values (Based on Importance)
Once you’ve determined what behaviors and actions you want to score, you need to attach a value to all of them. Either put everything on a scale of 1-100 or make it an uncapped value, where anything over a certain threshold gets pushed out. The most important thing is that the valuations make sense for your company’s goals.
3. Perfect Your Lead Routing Strategy
Once you have your scoring set up, put a lead routing strategy in place. Lead routing is the process of distributing your leads to the appropriate teams and employees. For example, just because a lead doesn’t score high enough to go to the sales team doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be engaged. Instead, you might want to route those leads to the marketing team for more nurturing and education.
Some companies will need to route different qualified leads to different sales team members. For example, you might want a highly-qualified lead with an off-the-charts lead score to go to your most experienced salesperson and your leads that barely hit the threshold to go to your new sales team members.
Finally, consider separating your leads based on other factors, like location, referral source, company size, and more. For your lead scoring to be successful, you also need to know what to do with the leads once they’re scored.
4. Implement the Right Tools to Automate the Scoring Process
Manual lead scoring is extremely tedious. It might be possible if you’re a smaller team or you only have a dozen or so leads coming in every week. But if you generate a lot of leads or have a larger team, it will be important to implement tools to automate the data collection and scoring process. For example, you might want a website visitor tracking tool to get more details about behavior and a CRM to automate the scoring process.
Get the Data You Need for an Effective Lead Scoring System
To qualify and score your leads, you’ll need data about their demographics, behaviors, company, and more. That’s where LeadLander can help.Using our website visitor tracking solution, B2B companies uncover the data they need to score and generate more leads. Try us free for 14 days to see how we can help you get better data and insights about your website visitors.