This is Part 3 of the Guide to Lead Scoring. You can view Part 1 here and Part 2 here. We’ve talked about what lead scoring is, and what types of scoring are common – so today, we’re going to cover the basics of getting started with lead scoring. Implementing a lead scoring system isn’t always simple, but the time and effort is worth it for your business. Following the 7 steps to starting a lead scoring system that we outline here will help you get started with your own process and make your business more efficient. Download the Free Ebook” title=” Guide to Lead Scoring” description=”The comprehensive Guide to Lead Scoring gives you the info, tools, and strategies that you need to put together a winning lead scoring process. You can download the entire guide in an easy-to-read PDF format here today – get started being more efficient and more profitable with our lead scoring methods right now.
Step One: Collect Information
Get your sales team together to collect all of the relevant data that may be used to indicate whether a prospect is interested and whether they’re ready to be sold to or not. You should check what pages on your website they visited, what the referring sites were, and any campaigns that may have influenced purchase.
Step Two: Test the Data
In order to know whether your data correlates to leads, you need to test it. Check your current leads and check their data in the categories you’ve collected. Do they look like leads? That is, do they pass the smell test? If not, go back to step one and choose different data inputs.
Step Three: Your Ideal Prospect
Look at who you’ve sold to before. What are their demographic and firmographic? What type of behavior did they exhibit? Did they contact you through an order form expressing interest? Use this data to create a profile of your perfect prospect.
Step Four: Establish Scores
Your sales team should go over the data you’ve collected, checking the profiles and the leads. Once they’ve done this, they should work with the marketing department to determine exactly what behavior makes someone a lead, and what behavior to ignore. You may want to assign points to each behavior. For instance, checking a product page may only be worth 1 point, while adding a product to a wish list may be worth 3 points.
Step Five: Create a Ranking System
You can assign each lead a letter grade, a numbered score, or a “hot” or “cold” ranking.
Step Six: Select a Threshold
Your threshold is when you will push for the sale. For example, if you’re using a letter grade, and you’ve decided your threshold is “B”, that means as soon as a prospect hits the B ranking, you’ll try to make a sale.
Optimizing Your Lead Scoring Process
Getting started with your lead scoring process is just the first step towards making your entire business more profitable. The fact is, you will never have the perfect process. So the second step to success is to continually look for new ways to improve and expand upon your original process. Here are some additional tips for further improvement:
- Constantly review and evaluate your sales metrics and scoring criteria to make sure you are scoring as accurately as possible.
- Don’t be afraid to change. If something in the process isn’t working, change it. Doing something over and over because “it’s how it is” instead of making it right is, as we know, insanity.
- Keep an open line. It’s highly important that everyone, from marketing to sales to leadership, understand and work within the system.
Step Seven: Assign Your Leads Scores
Go back through all of the data and rank each of your leads according to their scoring criteria you established in step four.
Your Lead Scoring System
It takes a lot of time and effort to put together a lead scoring system, but the results are worth it. Increased productivity, higher efficiency, and more success await those who put in the effort to develop a lead scoring system. In today’s competitive environment, a lead scoring system can be the advantage you need to make the leap to the next level.
