How to Create a Lead Scoring System

For businesses, increasing leads and, more importantly, nurturing and converting those leads is crucial; it is also incredibly difficult.  A lead scoring system will help you create a way to organize prospects according to various criteria. Each is assigned a score, and those with scores that meet or exceed a target are passed to sales teams. The rest can be nurtured or ignored, if they fail to meet a certain point value.  This will help focus the sales team’s attention on warm and hot leads, while allowing marketers to focus on nurturing those that are not quite ready for action. How do you create a lead scoring system?

According to MarketingSherpa, the ROI for lead generation was about 78 percent. For businesses using a lead scoring system, the ROI jumped to 138 percent. Most (79 percent) B2B marketers, they found, do not use a scoring system. To put yourself in the other 21 percent, start by:

• Identifying the criteria by which prospects will be scored. These can include: title, position, email (free, such as Gmail, or business specific), contact information, company type, size of company, type of information requested, age range (if appropriate), geographic location, etc.
• Look at analytics. What content did the prospect view? Were there certain products or services which interested him/her especially? Which pages did he/she engage with most? Which had the highest bounce rates?
• How active is the prospect? How many pages were viewed? Has he/she completed any forms or made any inquiries? Has this person gone past the point of no return? That is, has this person been in the sales cycle so long that he/she will likely never buy or complete the desired CTA?
• Assign a point value to these criteria. On a scale of 0 to 100, for instance, how many points does a prospect get for filling out a form? How many points are assigned to someone in an executive position at a midsized organisation? Or someone who is a “student.”  How many points are assigned as someone travels a desired route along the sales funnel? As you can begin to see, some factors weigh more heavily than others.
• Decide your threshold. How many points does one have to have before he/she is a warm lead? How few points before someone is ignored? Where is the middle ground where someone is “nurtured” ?

This is very subjective. What if you’ve scored someone a 60 and decide that it’s a warm lead, but this prospect is not really ready for a sales call or pitch? Do you change your scoring system, or do you write it off as individual variations? Good questions! This is why it is incredibly helpful to invest in lead scoring software or apps to help you get it “right” or as right as you can.