Want to Increase Sales? Give Lead Scoring a Try

If you’re spending a lot of time nurturing potential customers whether or not they are ready to buy, ranking leads could help you determine who is ready to buy, who is still in the decision-making process, and who is just looking around out of curiosity.

Ranking leads is officially called lead scoring, and though it’s a sales and marketing methodology that is commonly used by large companies to determine the sales-readiness of leads, the basics of lead scoring are applicable to small companies, too.  Lead scoring will help you learn how interested someone is in your business, if they fall within your target market, and what content they need in order to make the decision to become a customer. In other words, it will make your lead nurturing process more organized and targeted so you can spend more time on leads that matter.

Marketo published an excellent and really useful eBook on lead scoring that contains best practices and lots of worksheets to get you started.  Here are the basics, which I adjusted for small businesses that do not have a large sales team:

1. Gather information

Look through your list of potential customers (which should be in a customer relationship management, or CRM, program, and not on a spreadsheet, piece of paper, or, worse, in your head).  Look at:

• Past deals and current opportunities
• Online activity log: What pages did prospects visit, and where did they come from (search engines, other websites, etc.)?
• Previous contact: Have you spoken or emailed in the past?  Did a past marketing or promotional campaign catch their attention?

2. Determine your ideal target

Now you’ll score leads based on the information they share with you and their online behavior.

Explicit scoring is based on the information shared by the potential client, usually in a form they fill out.  It includes demographic and firmographic information like job title, industry, company size, and annual revenue.

Implicit scoring consists of tracking their online behavior, such as downloading white papers or eBooks, subscribing to your blog, filling out a form, etc, to measure their level of interest in your products or solutions.

3. Establish a lead methodology

Assign points to each piece of information and behavior.  You can also just use letter grades or the terms “hot,” “warm,” and “cold”—whatever works best for you.  Then determine the score that will indicate a “sales-ready” lead.

Image by Flickr user BOLTandK2 (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Monday, March 7th, 2011 at 9:00 am and is filed under Business Development, Marketing, Sales Process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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