How to Rock Your Lead Scoring System Using These 3 Best Practices

How to Rock Your Lead Scoring System Using These 3 Best Practices

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WARNING: LEAD SCORING SYSTEM CAN MAKE OR BREAK SALES TARGET IN A GIVEN MONTH.

We all (already!) know that consumers cannot be sales ready at all times. But still, Unqualified leads are the biggest waste of time for sales. So ironic! What is the result? You’re disappointed and stressed. Your sales team don’t meet their targets, so no bonus for them. *discouraged* Your revenue decreases. There is a simple fix for this STRESSFUL situation. A lead scoring mechanism. Here are the 3 best practices to create a lead scoring system.

Must Read: How the lead generation in USA market differ from the rest of the world

1. Involve sales and marketing team 

Let’s be logical. You may know your buyers but

Your sales and marketing team interact with them daily! So they are the best people to help you determine criteria for setting up a lead scoring system.

This criterion can be implicit or explicit based on your buyer persona. While explicit information deals with budget, authority, need, timeline etc (basically the BANT); implicit information deals with actions: page views, downloads, providing contact information etc. Take out your marker, whiteboard and begin asking:

  • What does the ideal lead look like?
  • Why do some leads end up being disqualified?
  • Which content pieces or how many of these pieces have successful leads consumed?
  • Which referral source has the highest close rate? etc

Once you have all the relevant information, put them in order of importance and give it a numerical value. For example, factors relating to need and budget are critical (meaning, more points!) while watching a seminar or downloading an ebook can be an influencing factor (meaning, lesser points) So, You have the basic mechanism ready now! 

Must Read: Sales success secrets: The critical role of lead generation and appointment setting

2. Negative scoring

We all hated negative marking in exams (at least I did)! But, do you remember how it increased your accuracy? While we all love to score positive actions, negativeswill increase your accuracy while qualifying leads (Sales qualified or Marketing qualified). This is Mr. Batman. Due to FBI in action, he is jobless. He visited your website (especially the careers page) and given you implicit signals (multiple page views, downloads etc). You keep adding points for his activities. Now, he hasn’t paid you a visit for long. Don’t you want to track all of that? Deduct points for visiting only career page or not visiting for long? Obviously, you do! If you don’t, you will end up inflating scores. Mr. Batman is just a job seeker after all. While it may seem obvious, NOT a lot of businesses follow it.

So, why not have that in place from the beginning? Don’t let your sales team get frustrated with catch-up game. Implement a lead scoring system instead.

Must Read: 10 Lead Generation Best Practices and Examples

3. Threshold  

You can’t keep scoring your leads to the maximum. You gotta have a threshold! So if you can score up to 100, keep the threshold at 80. I know it is common sense. But, 46% of B2B marketers have NOT set up a lead scoring threshold that will automatically alert or route leads to sales. (Spear Marketing) Reminds me of this guy – Once your lead reaches the threshold, it should be automatically assigned to your sales team. You can do this with a marketing automation tool. Alternatively, a lead management software can help you auto score or re-score your leads. Voila! It not only makes it easy for the team, it minimizes the guesswork. Who wouldn’t like that? If you have already implemented a lead scoring system, do comment below and share your experience with us.

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