Updated December 2022

 Today’s marketers have access to so much information about their prospects, but they struggle to use it and benefit from it. As marketers, we can use this information to learn more about our prospects, who they are, what they want, and how interested they are in your product/service/company. One of the ways to prioritize and to utilize this information is to score leads and identify who the best prospects are, whom to focus our efforts on, and who is ready to be passed to Sales for more personal engagement.

Lead scoring is often thought of as being too complicated, but even a simple lead scoring model can save your company time and money. Qualify sales ready leads and generate more revenue opportunity.

Who Benefits from a Lead Scoring Model?

Businesses benefit from a thoughtful lead scoring model. Here are just a few of the numerous benefits both sides will begin to see:

1. 1. A lead scoring model begins to unify marketing and sales. It opens the door for conversation, collaboration, teamwork, and a unified lead lifecycle.
   2. With a lead scoring model in place, marketing and sales are able to measure marketing effectivenessand lead quality.
   3. By paying attention to the types of marketing generated leads and the types of leads sales are converting to customers, the lead nurturing process can be constantly tweaked and improved to increase marketing qualified leads (MQLs).
   4. By actively and continuously scoring your leads, you are able to identify quality, sales-ready leads faster in the marketing stages and automatically pass them to sales.
   5. Lead scoring models help organizations prioritize leads and improve sales’ productivity and effectiveness.
   6. Sales and Marketing coming together to define a lead scoring model also closes the gap on the entire sales process.

How Do You Begin To Develop a Lead Scoring Model?

1. 1. Start the conversation by holding a lead scoring workshop with key groups like sales and marketing.
   2. Establish what is important to score on. Ask the following questions:
      1. What are the minimum criteria a lead must pass to become a customer?
      2. What qualities do your current customers have in common
      3. What are some characteristics of your ideal customers (i.e., job title, budget, etc.)?
      4. What does the successful customer journey look like?
      5. What behavior do you find an extremely interested lead would have (i.e., email opens, clicks, forwards, web page visits, form submissions, etc.)?
   3. Assign weights to the criteria and behaviors you established above.  Take a look at how much weight one criterion should be relevant to another and assign points.
   4. Identify different types of lead generating campaigns and what each one consists of (i.e., content nurture campaigns vs. event/webinars).  You may need separate scoring models for each campaign type because a qualified lead in a content nurture campaign might look different from a qualified lead in an event/webinar campaign.  Look at the components that are in your campaigns (i.e., emails, landing pages, events, social)?
   5. Now formulate what criteria it takes for a lead to be “Sales-Ready.”That number helps you identify the “Sales-Ready” score range for your leads.
   6. Lead scoring, like many other aspects of marketing and sales, requires some level of trial and error.  It’s better to get started now and make some progress.  You can always make adjustments.

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