[Guest Post] 4 Critical Tips for Qualifying and Scoring Your Leads

Learn how to grow your list

Website traffic is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow! When you see a spike, you know you’ve done something right.

All of the content you’ve published is finally pulling people in. They’re sharing your material and signing up to find out more.

Isn’t that what everything you wanted..?

Nope! Traffic is just the beginning. Of course, it provides volume, exposure and data but what you really want are qualified leads…and within this pool you want to pick out the most promising of them all.

Without sufficient tracking and marketing automation software in place, it can be near-enough impossible to see the wood for the trees. You can’t pass solid leads through to your sales team if you don’t have an understanding of their warmth, intent and journey from first visit up until conversion.

Lead scoring (or lead grading) is the key to filtering out the very best leads of the pack.

All Leads Are Not Equal

To get the best possible return on your marketing investment, you must be able to separate quality leads from the scrap.

Without an organised method to manage this process, you’ll struggle to make any headway or capitalise on all that traffic you’ve worked hard to earn.

This is why lead scoring is vital.

Lead scoring is a simple process of assigning points to your leads according to factors that you define. Leads that pick up the most points hit the top of the quality scale so you have the best chance of acting upon them. Leads with a low score fall through the net and don’t consume resource.

That means less wastage and more ROI.

So, how do you separate the good leads from the bad?

1. Evaluate the Gaps in your Conversion Strategy First

As demonstrated, you can have plenty of traffic without gaining any leads. In contrast, you can also have a huge number of leads but little success closing them…

If that sounds familiar, you don’t need lead scoring. You need to work on your website first.

To use lead scoring effectively, the journey up to that point has to be sound. You need outstanding content in place. Leaks in your funnel must be plugged and you should be collecting critical data on conversions…

Remember: to make sense of leads, you’re going to need to implement the hottest lead scoring tools that will require heaps of resource. That doesn’t mean lead scoring won’t help you – it’s just important to be in the right position to actually apply those scores to your funnel and internal sales processes.

2. You must Score on the Touch Points Relevant to YOUR Business

So you know you need to score something…but what are you going to score?

Well, you’ll either be glad or nervous to know there is no one-size-fits-all scoring system.

Some businesses score on job roles while others are more interested in interactions. Some look at number of visits; others disregard bounces.

For example, you can be reasonably sure that someone is engaged if they visit a string of service pages on your website. They’re clearly interesting in learning about what you do and actively making a judgement on the information you provide. If that visitor then moves onto the pricing page and completes a contact form, you should consider them a ‘marketing qualified’ lead and assign them a high score to suit.

In terms of job role, it’s simple enough to score a lead in theory. A CXO is likely to have purchasing power: that’s your future customer, right there. Someone in the customer support team may not hold any purse strings. You can apply a score to weight the lead either way.

But roll it back for a second. How do you capture that job role? Do you have the data you’re trying to act upon? Discuss with your marketers and sales team to ensure you’re capturing the data they need. If you aren’t, you might be scoring touch points that aren’t mission critical.

A simple addition to your contact form fields can accommodate this need. With advanced marketing automation software, you can even dynamically alter contact forms and download screens based on that user’s past behaviour on the website. Cool, right?

3. It is a Cycle: Look Backwards and Forwards

Speaking of past behaviour; to discover which leads are most valuable, you’re going to need to review previous interactions to create accurate buyer personas. Analyse conversions. Look at the journeys that led to them and the business value of each action…

With lead scoring, you’re looking for people that have downloaded something, filled in a form or attended a webinar for a product and then perhaps gone on to buy from you (sometimes, repeatedly). This isn’t guesswork: you should already have the data to reinforce this.

If you regularly monitor web analytics, you probably know that deep engagement correlates with increased score. Precisely how you weight this is up to you…

4. Weight your Scores in the Here and Now

Scoring can get really complex really fast. It’s best to use a basic percentage system:

On each factor, score your lead on a scale of 1 to 100.

Someone casually cruising for a job vacancy is most likely going to acquire a score of zero. A brochure download might score 30.

It’s also important to know when a lead has passed its expiry date. Some people continuously play around with quotes and prices but don’t have any real urgency to buy (or may even be a competitor), so they may acquire a minus score for repeated actions over a period of time, dependent on other scoring factors.

Remember these two points:

One – Your scores have to be consistent; there has to be some kind of relationship and a scale that makes sense in terms of developing a weighting.

Two – You need a threshold. When a lead score exceeds that positive score, it’s time to go for the sale. Similarly, one that reaches a certain negative score should be disregarded and omitted from any email drip-feeds.

In Summary: Lead Scoring is Essential

Lead scoring can be as simple or as complex as you like. If you’re just starting out, make it easy for yourself by imagining how likely it would be that a salesperson could convert that lead today.

Your aim is to provide your sales team with leads that are ‘marketing qualified’ (based on a range of evidence) using the latest data. Approach these leads too early and they’re going to resist or even be put off altogether. Catch them late and boom: the opportunity has passed…they’ve already spent their money elsewhere!

Either way, lead scoring is the only way to make the most of all that traffic which you’ve invested so much time and resource to generate. Content, inbound strategy and offline marketing are great but without a scoring system, you’ll never truly capitalise on the breadth of potential you’ve created.

About the author

Sam Hurley is a lateral-thinking digital marketer holding solid experience in both agency and client-side settings before launching his own digital consultancy venture: OPTIM-EYEZ.

He has achieved success for both agency and client-side businesses from SME, national to international blue-chip organisations while casually being ranked as the World’s #2 most influential digital marketer.

Catch him on Twitter for heaps of helpful tweets on entrepreneurship and marketing.