Lead Scoring Turns Trash to Treasure

Challenge: How do you optimize your sales rep time by focusing them on your most qualified leads?

How many times have you heard, ‘Marketing just gives us a bunch of lame leads for follow up’? The issue is to clearly identify what characteristics early stage leads have so that marketing can deliver stronger, more appropriate leads.

Lead scoring is a great exercise that brings together sales and marketing. Effective scoring of leads will ensure your sales team is following up on the best leads and not wasting time calling junk.

Lead scoring generally breaks down along two dimensions: qualification and interest scores. Qualification scores refer to information the prospect provides about himself or what you can learn about him from research. This information typically includes location (address), size (revenue or employees), industry, buying timeframe, budget, role/title, etc. The challenge with this information is that prospects do not always fill out forms truthfully. However, you can enhance the data with third-party validations like D&B or other sources.

The second dimension of lead scoring is interest. This measures the actions taken by your prospect, including the number of website visits, date of the last website visits, number of web pages viewed, number of offers downloaded, high value content consumed, etc. Because interest score measures actual behavior, this is often looked at as more reliable to identify a prospect.

However, using the two scores together, you can develop an even more detailed profile of your prospect in terms of their overall sales readiness. Close collaboration between sales and marketing can achieve a common approach to lead scoring and the delivery of more sales ready leads to the sales organization. More data is good – mutual agreement on how to score this data is even better. The result is that both your sales and marketing organization will now be focused on finding the same type of prospects and align their interests.

Lesson: Score one for both the sale and marketing teams by scoring leads with information input from the prospect as well as behavior gathered from the prospect’s web activities.

Author: Larry Stein at TechMarketingStrategies

For the last 20 years, I have led demand generation teams supporting high growth technology companies. Now working as an independent consultant, my responsibility is to apply best practices in the creation of these programs. My goal is to enable marketing teams to become self sufficient with a data driven culture of KPI's, test and measurement in service of achieving company revenue targets. My approach is to work with senior management identifying objectives and wildly important goals. With these in mind, we work together to build programs, processes and systems that will reach these goals along with the measurement KPI's to evaluate progress. Along the way we will enable the team to manage and maintain these systems so achieving these goals becomes a natural cadence of the marketing organization. View all posts by Larry Stein at TechMarketingStrategies