How to Develop Lead Scoring

How to Develop Lead Scoring

The lead generation industry has a complex distribution model and sometimes rather obscure interconnections. Like any industry, when a lack of transparency exists, there’s s a ripe opportunity for fraudsters looking to make a quick buck.

Fortunately, the industry has shifted towards a model that emphasizes solutions that can guarantee quality in the vast quantity of data being traded.

This is why lead scoring and verification systems have become essential over the last few years. By rating leads according to different parameters, lead scoring systems can give sales organizations information on how likely leads are to convert based on prospect identity, interest and intent.

Lead Scoring Systems Advantages

In addition to giving organizations insights into quality management, lead scoring systems have other advantages:

• Greater sales efficiency thanks to insights into which leads are “hot”, “warm” or “cold”. This means it is much easier for salesmen to get an indication which leads are of high-quality and need urgent follow-up
• Greater marketing efficiency because organizations can determine which channels or strategies produce the leads of highest quality.
• Sales and Marketing departments are more likely to align because of having a common concept of what constitutes lead value.

As mentioned above, lead scoring looks at prospect identity, interest and intent to give organizations an all-round picture of how sales-ready leads are based on who they are, as well as the level of interest and intent mirrored by their behavior. Moreover, good lead scoring systems take into account results of lead verification systems in order to base lead scores on whether data is correct and valid.

Scoring a lead based on “who they are” means to look at the basics: Are they a good fit in terms of location, gender, age, etc? Is the lead contactable? This explicit data can give marketers an insight into whether or not the basic criteria are met for the lead to convert.

Once the base is covered, implicit data relating to user behavior on the form or website can give even better insights into how sales-ready leads are. This behavior includes how many clicks were made on the form, how many error messages popped up, how much time it took the user to fill in the form, whether or not it is a returning visitor and if so how many times he/she has visited your website, etc. These different criteria can put lead data into context and give information on how likely the lead is to actually buy the service or product you’re offering.

Developing Your Lead Scoring System

If you are developing your own lead scoring system, the best starting point is to define all explicit and implicit factors that influence the quality of a lead and examine how the different criteria relate to each other.

It’s very important to have a very clear system in place to define how parameters and categories weigh relate to each other in order to establish how individual parameters are weighed in giving an overall score. For example, how are you going to compare returning visitors, i.e. a lead that visited your website twice last week vs a lead that visited you website twice yesterday? Is the parameter of being in the right location going to outweigh the time the user spent on your form?

Depending on the weighing of individual parameters, lead scoring can be significantly fine-tuned. This of course means that you need a large amount of data to make certain observations and correlations between buying intent and user behavior.

Consider Outsourcing

This is the main reason why lead scoring is a serious undertaking. You don’t only need to have access to large amounts of data but also need have systems in place to analyze data and how to correctly weigh and parameters. This can be an intricate and time-consuming task.

If your business is not prepared to take on the lead scoring obligation, you may want to consider outsourcing it to companies that that specialize in this area so that they can help you predict salability.