Lead Scoring – What is it and why does it work?

As I mentioned in my last blog post, lead scoring can help you establish a list of engaged clients who are already educating themselves about your company, services or products. Effective lead scoring can look like a lot of work at first, but it definitely pays off in the long run.

Lead scoring is defined as a methodology used to rank prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value each lead represents to the organization. These metrics may include job position, number of social media followers, company size, content engagement and more. It is up to you and your company to determine what metrics you will use to rank the value of your prospects.

Lead scoring allows you to attach values to each prospect based on their professional information and the behavior they’ve exhibited when interacting with your company’s website, social media pages or content. However, you should first determine if lead scoring is right for your company.

To evaluate if lead scoring is right for you, ask yourself: is your sales team getting enough leads at all, regardless of score? Does your sales team follow through on the leads they are getting, or are they complaining about bad leads? Do you even have enough data to implement lead scoring, like customer demographics or baseline behavioral data?

If the answer to all of those questions is yes, you should definitely consider lead scoring for your company.

You’ll first want to organize a meeting between your marketing and sales team to ensure that the definition of a ‘qualified lead’ is consistent throughout your company. Then, establish benchmarks that are worth points. For example, clicking on a link in an email could be worth 5 points, but filling out a form on a landing page could be worth 10 points.

Eventually, you will build up enough data to look at leads and know immediately if they are ready to be contacted by your sales team. This will allow you to grow your customer base more quickly and have a better idea of what leads will be successful.