Lead Scoring Best Practices: Everything You Need to Know
- Makiko Ara
- July 27, 2023
“Ugh, I’ve got too many good leads,” said no salesperson in history.
But many sales teams do struggle to manage and prioritize their leads effectively. Overwhelmed with a list of prospects — all at different lifecycle stages — a sales rep can quickly end up in reaction mode, and that is not a recipe for success. Lead scoring best practices can improve the efficiency of both sales and marketing teams and, ultimately, improve cooperation and conversions.
What is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring is a vital tool that allows your organization to prioritize potential customers based on the likelihood they’ll make a purchase. (It’s also essential to avoiding a “blame game” between sales and marketing when deals are slow.)
Scoring is based on two factors:
- Details you know about a lead (explicit information)
- Activities prospects take that suggest they might be ready to convert (implicit data)
What is lead scoring NOT? It’s not an indication of how a prospect feels about your brand. Someone can love your company and not be ready to work with you, or be indifferent to your specific business but really need your solution. Lead scoring is not there to stroke your ego — like how many people liked your last social post. It’s about determining readiness to buy.
The Benefits of Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is a pretty old-school practice. Does it really matter to your team? You’ve got a lot more data at your fingertips than marketing or sales teams ever had.
The short answer is yes, it does matter. All that information has only increased the benefits of lead scoring. Look at it this way: you only have so many hours in a day. With metrics on web traffic, social interactions, email opens, and ad click-through rates, you have way more potential customers on your plate than you could ever follow up with. But one of those prospects is probably your next big deal in the making.
Lead scoring helps you prioritize all those contacts as they progress along their individual buyer journeys so you know where to focus. Implementing lead scoring best practices can help your teams:
- Reduce the time it takes to close a deal
- Increase conversion rates
- Improve efficiency and reduce sales and marketing costs
Still think you don’t need lead scoring? If your organization has infinite resources to follow up with every single person who visits your site, downloads your content, follows you on Facebook, or picks up your card at a trade show, you win. You don’t specifically need lead scoring.
But.
Lead scoring can still help you improve your prospects’ overall experiences, enhancing their satisfaction with your brand and setting them up to be advocates on your behalf.
Should Your Team Be Scoring Leads?
Timing is essential when it comes to lead scoring. If your organization struggles to acquire enough leads, you might want to hold off on lead scoring for now. Focus on lead generation activities and make sure your buyer personas are current.
But don’t wait too long to start implementing lead scoring best practices. If any of these issues sound familiar, the time to start scoring leads is now.
Marketing Team
- The sales team isn’t following up with all Sales Qualified Leads
- Leads passed to sales are taking longer to close than expected
- The sales team is disqualifying too many leads
Sales Team
- There are too many leads for your team to follow up with
- Leads from marketing need more nurturing than expected
- Too many leads from marketing are not qualified
If your sales team is overwhelmed with leads once you’ve implemented a lead scoring system, it just means you need to adjust so lower-scoring prospects stay in nurture funnels longer while sales teams focus on those with the most potential.
How to Implement a Lead Scoring System
Setting Scores
Define leads’ readiness for sales contact on a scale of 0 to 100. Sales and marketing teams often have different names for these levels, so make sure you’re aligned on where a lead transitions to the next stage.
| Score | Sales Team | Marketing Team |
|---|---|---|
|
0-25 points |
Cold |
Leads |
|
26-50 points |
Warm |
MQLs |
|
51-75 points |
Hot |
SQLs |
|
76-100 points |
Burning Hot |
For immediate follow-up |
Determining Fit and Interest
A lead’s sales readiness is based on two key factors:
- Fit (based on that explicit information we mentioned before)
- Interest (extrapolated from implicit data you’ve collected)
Buyer Fit
These are the top criteria for defining a sales-ready lead:
- Budget: Can they afford you? (Gross profit and company size are good clues, but it never hurts to ask outright.)
- Authority: Are you dealing with a decision-maker? (Or are they just researching on behalf of higher-ups?)
- Need: Do the benefits of your solution outweigh the negative effects of them doing nothing? (Uncovering pains and status can give you insight here.)
- Timeline: How urgently do they need your solution? (Outside pressures often affect purchase timelines — make sure you understand what they are.)
Buyer Interest
Track your leads’ activity — both digital and analog — to understand their intent. Pay attention to:
- Page views
- Landing page conversions
- Email engagement
- Social engagement
- App engagement
- Phone communication
- Tradeshow interaction
- Event participation
Assigning Scores
You’ve agreed on what your lead scores mean — but what about how they’re assigned? You won’t reap the benefits of lead scoring if sales and marketing can’t agree on what criteria identifies a good lead. (Experienced frontline sales reps generally have a clear picture of what makes a lead cold, warm, or hot. Don’t ignore their expertise.)
- What does the ideal lead look like?
- Why did specific leads end up being disqualified?
- What makes one lead “easier to close” than others?
- What characteristics caused roadblocks or challenges for closing?
- What journey do the “best deals” go through?
- What are some of the most common questions asked by leads?
Prioritize implicit and explicit criteria and group them by importance:
Critical
(10-15 points)
Important
(5-9 points)
Influencing
(1-4 points)
Negative
(- points)
Image source: HubSpot
Now it’s time for some math. Does the sum of a typical lead’s points produce the expected score? (Don’t worry if it doesn’t — this is an iterative process, and it’s unlikely you’ll nail it on the first attempt.)
If you have a marketing automation tool with built-in lead scoring, you can simply implement the methodology you’ve developed, and the tech will handle the rest. If you don’t, open a spreadsheet and start listing attributes and assigning them positive or negative scores.
Post-Lead Scoring Best Practices
With your lead scoring system in place, your work has just begun! Make sure you have a clear, effective process for handing leads from marketing to sales, so valuable potential customers don’t slip through internal cracks.
Assign Actions
Knowing which leads are hot and which are cold is pretty useless if you don’t know what to do with them. Develop an action plan that details what sales and marketing should do at each level.
Evaluate Your System
If at first you don’t succeed… you know what comes next.
Examine SQL close rates a few months after implementing your lead scoring system. Can your sales team handle more leads? Are they getting too many? Keep adjusting until you find the right balance.
If you find several prospects have gone through your process and deals have fallen through, gone stagnant, or been disqualified, re-examine your lead scoring criteria to see what went wrong. You may need to weight some factors more heavily — or additional metrics may be needed.
Ready to Reap the Benefits of Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring only becomes more valuable as the channels where you engage with leads (and the data you have on them) increases. It can drive revenue, help lower costs, and improve the all-important customer experience.
Hopefully, you now realize it’s not as complex as you previously thought, but if you’re still daunted, we’re here to help.
At TPM, we have decades of experience helping B2B tech companies of all sizes generate, score, and nurture leads. Let our team kickstart your marketing efforts. Contact us today to discuss what we can do for you.
