What is Lead Scoring, and How Can it Help Improve Sales?

Lead scoring helps salespeople prioritize their efforts based on the likelihood of a lead converting into a customer.
There are multiple factors and at least six models that sales teams can use to score their leads.
Sales managers should consult with both their teams and with customers to discover the most important factors.
Many companies will find it useful to implement multiple types of scoring systems as they scale and diversify.
Smart Funnel helps companies accelerate their sales growth using these strategies in tandem with lead generation.

Sales managers often wonder what they can do to help their sales team work more efficiently. There are thousands of leads to sort through, and clearly, not all of them are going to convert. How can sales representatives know whether or to what degree a lead is worth their time? Through lead scoring, a potential prospect’s relative value for the company can be easy to see.

The Fundamentals of Lead Scoring

Lead scoring means giving a point value to each lead based on certain factors it has in common with other leads. These factors reflect the way the lead is engaging with your brand, and how it became a lead in the first place.

The scoring system depends on the availability of data that companies can gather about their leads throughout the lead generation and nurturing processes. By comparing new leads with previous ones, patterns become clear. You can then use these patterns to your advantage during the sales process.

The system gives leads that are more likely to convert into prospects a higher number of points than those which aren’t. Likewise, leads that have a lot in common with others that ended up purchasing have an even greater value, and so receive even more points.

This allows sales reps to instantly see which leads are most likely to be worth spending time trying to contact and speak with.

Models to Score By

There’s more than one way to eat a Reese’s. There’s also more than one way to assign scores to your leads. You should base the ones you choose on what’s most relevant to your company’s needs and marketing strategy. Your preferred methods may change over time. You may even want to experiment with all of them at first to see what works best.

1. Demographics

You can gather basic demographic data from your website’s landing forms and use that to focus on the most relevant types of people for your product. If someone falls into a category that you don’t sell to at all, you can remove that lead from the list. This is especially useful when you can find out a lead’s role within their own company. You can use this to narrow leads down into specific geographical regions as well.

2. Company Types

Your landing page forms can also help you identify leads from the right types of businesses. If your product is only relevant to B2B customers, then you would give a lower score to a lead that identifies as coming from a B2C organization.

3. Behaviors

You can gauge a lead’s value by what they do when they visit your website. More page views and more collateral downloads can indicate more interest. Be conscious of changes in behavior, too. A lead that looked at a lot of pages but hasn’t been back in the past three months may no longer have a need for what you offer. Not all pages are equal, either. Viewing and clicking on certain pages or elements like demo videos could lead to higher lead scoring.

4. Engagement

Leads may sign up for your email campaigns for any number of reasons. That alone isn’t always a good indicator of interest or compatibility. On the other hand, the extent to which they actually open the emails can be a powerful sign. More so when they actually click through the email’s links. Track this data carefully, and score accordingly!

5. Social Networking

This model is most useful if your ideal customers have an active social media presence. More followers can equal a higher score. Similarly to other models, clickthroughs on tweets and Facebook posts may boost a lead’s relevance.

6. Spammers

You can easily detect leads from landing forms that aren’t legitimately interested at all. Look for anomalies like uncapitalized names and unusually long sequences of letters adjacent to each other on keyboards. These are indications of spammers in a hurry.

If you’re B2B, you can also filter out individuals not associated with a business by giving lower points to generic email addresses from Gmail and Yahoo!

Implementation

To choose the right models, you should make sure you know what’s most important to your company.

Talk to Everyone and Analyze Your Data

You should first talk to your sales staff. They’ll be able to tell you what kinds of leads are converting most often, and what kind of sales collateral gets them to that point. You can assign higher scores to leads that interact with that collateral and have the characteristics your team indicates.

Your customers themselves may have different points of view about what it was exactly that brought them to you and convinced them to buy. Listen to them, too, and score accordingly. This difference in opinion won’t necessarily contradict the sales team, it’s just a different perspective.

Lastly, the numbers don’t lie (usually). Run the data through the latest machine learning algorithms, and watch the associations between certain lead generation factors and conversion appear!

Consider Multiple Types of Scores

You may notice that some models have more to do with how well a lead fits your ideal customer profile. Other models are more helpful at identifying their level of interest, regardless of who, what, where, or why. Both can be useful, depending on your product.

If the lead fits, but they don’t really care, then it’s probably not a great lead, unless you want to take the time to nurture them and get them interested.

If the lead is really enthusiastic about your product, but there’s no indication they could actually become a customer because of their demographic profile, then maybe you should hire them into your sales team instead of marketing to them.

If you have multiple types of products, then there could be more room for those types of discrepancies between fit and interest. That may also require separate sales teams and other scaling strategies. Don’t forget that existing customers can also be scored based on their potential for upselling.

More Effective Lead Management with Smart Funnel

If you want to implement a lead scoring system, Smart Funnel can help you get started. We help our clients accelerate their sales process through both lead generation and the sales enablement they need to act on those leads faster.