Marketing entails selling out your product’s idea to people. In sales and marketing, you must understand the readiness of an individual prospect to buy your product. With this knowledge, you can easily ascertain the level of communication – whether intense or mild- that needs to be devoted to each specific customer. And, this is where lead scoring comes in.

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is a methodology – employed both in sales and marketing- used for ranking leads to determine their sales-readiness. Lead scoring means judging a potential lead’s interest- in the service or product you offer- through the information that gives or the actions they complete.

So, if someone says they would buy your product in 2 weeks- by picking that option on a questionnaire- they have shown more interest in your product and so, their lead score increases.

The goal of lead scoring is to identify leads that are ready to be plucked by the sales department and recognize those who need further pushing. You must understand that lead scoring is not harvesting the ready leads, while ignoring the other ones to scorch in the sun. Essentially, no one is left behind.

Taking your lead scoring skills to the next level involves the implementation of certain practices and tips. And just as a retractable banner stand would boost your marketing efficiency, good lead scoring skills would not just boost your sales productivity, but also mend the bridge between you and your potential customers.

Employ Negative Scoring and Score Deduction

In as much as lead scoring aids better marketing and general productivity, it also has its own share of downsides. And, this tip drives from the core of one of the common problems with lead scoring.

The problem? When we think of lead scoring, our minds are immediately inclined towards making a qualified lead score higher- after all, that’s the whole point of marketing. However, after successfully passing a lead on to the sales, you get a complaint that your leads are always bad. Why this? Well, focusing on scoring leads too high, does cause as many problems as it solves. The solution? Negative scoring.

This technique targets leads that fulfill certain disqualifying criteria and deducts marks from them. This generally allows only deserving, and good leads to scale through to sales.

For instance, take a look at the supply of ‘email addresses’. If your landing page requests an individual to supply their company’s address, you would still find people who relay an address with a ‘@gmail.com’ or ‘@hotmail.com’. Either way, that’s a characteristic of personal mail. This is where negative scoring comes in.

Most likely, these individuals aren’t ready to buy your product, so they are just test-running your site, or they are not even planning on buying it in the first instance. So, instead of rating them higher through assigning of higher scores, set aside a specific score that you would deduct whenever a personal email is supplied.

It doesn’t end there though. The lead doesn’t necessarily have to violate a rule to be negatively scored. For instance, if your product is targeted towards a specific industry- say the power sector- and, a lead is from another industry- totally different from your preferred industry- you can apply negative scoring.

Establish a Lead Scoring Threshold

It would be an absolute waste of effort to base your lead qualification scheme on guesswork. Instead, a threshold should be fixed; a threshold agreed to by the sales team. This way, it is super easy to ascertain what leads are qualified to be passed on to the sales while expelling guesswork from lead ranking.

Customize your Points Based on High-Value Engagement and Webpages

Not all actions a lead carries on your page should have equal points. Instead, you should assign more points to actions carried on the high-value section of your page. For instance, the ‘contact us’ or ‘price list’ page should have more points as compared to other sections of your web.

This would allow you to winnow out leads that are taking real actions and steps towards becoming actual customers.

Set Up Different Rankings Based on Individual Products

If your company is one that deals with a variety of products, you should consider setting up separate lead scoring models for each product. This allows you to identify a potential customer’s interest in that specific product. So, instead of using a generic model that takes into account every single product, resort to a single model – which leads to more specific results and better lead analysis.

For instance, if a prospect singly interested in product A, is scored using a generic model that takes products E and B into consideration, this prospect might end up with a low score; and a proposed disinterest in your products and services. Whereas, there is an interest in product A.

Conclusion

The proper lead analysis helps you and your sales team become more efficient and observant. So, go ahead and follow the tips- then watch the magic!