Technology

Lead Scoring

A problem inherent in the long sales cycle of B2B is that not all leads are ready to buy now. In fact many won’t make a purchase decision for over 12 months. So how do you deal with them? At first pass, many categorize the leads as they are collected, at a trade show for example. A person walks into the booth asks about the product, asks the right questions, fits the profile, has budget – excellent – hot lead, send it to sales. And what about of the free gift seekers who stopped in and swiped a badge – cold leads, add them to the database.

So what happens next?

Best Case - Sales picks up the hot leads and follows up with a phone call. Unfortunately many leads will not actuall be “Hot” to sales. Some maybe luke warm at best. Now the real trouble starts. Sales is frustrated with marketing for supplying under qualified leads and they are under pressure from management to convert those leads to customers. The leads languish and become disiluusioned with your company.

What about the cold leads?

Moth balled in the basement or maybe sent a piece of collateral reminding them about your company. In either case, not much hope of them becoming a sale.

Studies indicate that up to 80% of the marketing dollars spent like this will be wasted. The leads will atrophy and your sales targets will not be met. So, how can this be avoided? Using a process know as lead scoring.

Lead Scoring is a method where points are assigned to different criteria for a lead. As a lead is evaluated against these criteria it will develop a profile and a lead score. The score is a numerical value determined by adding up the points rated on each of the different criteria. This method removes much of the ambiguity in a Hot/Warm/Cold ranking system and allows leads to be clearly evaluated and ranked. Based on a lead’s score it would be either forwarded to sales for follow up or kept in a hopper to be further nurtured.

The qualifying criteria can be much more sophisticated than a few questions frequently used. The criteria cold include factors such as the number of interactions with your company or the types of information downloaded from your website. Situational questions such as these combined with standard lead qualification question provide a more detailed picture of the leads true relevance.

Another benefit of this method is its ability to be adjusted. If the feedback from sales indicates that the leads are not yet ready for sales then the lead treshhild can be adjusted. The threshold is the minimum score required for the lead to be forwarded. By adjusting the threshold up or down more or less leads will be passed through to sales.

Lead scoring allows you to rank and prioritize all of your leads and better determine their likely hood of being converted to a customer. You can also avoid the battles between sales and marketing over the definition of a hot lead.