Lead Scoring Demystified

Simply put lead scoring is a way to give an automatic “grade” or “score” to your leads based off their likelihood to close. The leads in the top of your funnel will have a lower score or grade than the ones that have moved (or have been nurtured) to lower stages of your funnel.

Scores can be based off their engagement with content, conversions (form fills, chats, phone calls), going to various pages of your website within a given timeframe, email marketing opens / clicks and even things like unsubscribe, e-commerce and so much more.

Most people get hung up with Lead Scoring in trying to understand the “point system”. The reality is you make up the point system by what works best for your organization and sales process. We personally like to keep it simple with a 25-point system before the lead is considered qualified and handed over sales. In implementing multiple systems over the years for clients, we usually find this is a pretty safe place to start without over complicating things.

So often do businesses experience the classic: sales is doing nothing with the leads we give them, what is their purpose – so says the marketer. And from sales’ vantage point: marketing just floods me with junk leads that go nowhere and it’s a waste of my time.

Sound familiar?

This is the classic push pull frustration caused between two key pillars of the business: marketing and sales.

Lead scoring has the ability to solve this dilemma by slowing down the lead volume to sales and only handing off prospects that are considered “qualified”. By doing this, sales is able to close the leads faster as they are deeper down the funnel – more intent on buying vs having to warm up the lead while selling to them.

Pro tip: Lead scoring doesn’t just have to be lead focused, it can also be customer focused (and team focused). In the same vein we work with leads, we can pivot lead scoring methods to point to our customer engagement, up-sells/cross-sells to understand who our brand ambassadors are in the market. Doing this can again put purpose to the moves we make from a lead acquisition standpoint by modeling our net new lead generation tactics to target those prospects who look like our most engaged customer base.

To demystify lead scoring, our team has put together a sample lead scoring matrix to aid in implementation. Download it for free by entering your email address. We hope it helps you get started and qualifying those leads!