This article is a guest contribution from HubSpot, published with permission.
Lead scoring can be a critical tool to help your business automate its marketing process.
However, lead scoring is not the right solution for all businesses. It’s important to understand where your business stands as a candidate for lead scoring before deciding whether or not to implement this highly useful tool into your marketing plan.
Use these questions to help you determine whether or not your business is ready for lead scoring today and what it might take to get you there.
1: Do You Currently Have Enough Leads?
Lead scoring is about prioritizing lead contacts so that you’re taking advantage of the most
likely candidates. That isn’t necessary if you don’t have enough leads to keep your sales team
occupied at the moment. Turn your attention to lead generation for the moment and revisit
the idea of lead scoring when you’re swimming in leads.
2: Is Your Team Consistently Following Up with Existing Leads?
If your team isn’t following up with the current leads, chances are they aren’t going to do so
once you’ve gone to the effort of implementing lead scoring. Create a system within your
organization to ensure that the proper lead “touches” are at least attempted with existing
leads before seeking ways to prioritize or score them.
3: Have You Defined Characteristics of Ideal Leads?
Do you know what makes one lead more likely to buy than others? Do you have a rating
system in place that helps you determine, before you even call leads whether or not those
leads are likely to buy? In order to accurately score leads, you need to have a ranking system
by which to score them.
4: Do You Have Enough Information or Data on Your Existing Leads?
In order to effectively score leads, there is one thing you must have about all leads –information. The more data you gather about your leads, the more demographic and
behavioral information you have on your leads the better able you’ll be to score those leads.
What types of information do you need? The information varies from one business to the next,
these are examples of the type of information that will help you get better results from your
lead scoring efforts.
- Location – While not important for all lead scoring systems, regional businesses that are limited to specific geographic locations should eliminate all leads outside that location (whether it’s a country, city, county, state, zip code, etc.) from the queue.
- Contact information – The more ways you have to contact potential leads the better. The key points of contact you want from your leads are their name (first and last), email, street address, and phone number. Include these fields on the “lead capture” page though some people make different fields optional and use the amount of information provided as part of the lead scoring process. The more fields provided the greater the interest.
- Budget – Getting budget information helps you identify leads that lack the means to buy the product or service you have to offer so you can remove them from your follow-up queue as well.
- Engagement (pages visited on your site, the length of the visit, frequency of visits, emails opened, downloads, videos watched, etc.)
leads are for what you have to offer. Hungrier leads get a higher score and require more
direct attention.
5: Will You Prioritize Setup and Implementation of Lead Scoring System?
Getting started with lead scoring is half the battle. It takes time and energy to get off the
ground. The rewards of doing so, however, are high. If you’re not willing to make getting your
lead scoring system started a priority for your business then there is no point at all in even
considering it.
Lead Scoring Checklist
To recap, there are several things businesses must have in order to make lead scoring a good
match for their needs. Without the following things, you’re going to have a difficult time
enjoying the full benefits lead scoring has to offer.
- Ample Leads to Contact
- A Sales Team that Follows Up with Leads
- Criteria for Scoring Leads
- Ample Data on Leads
- Willingness to Prioritize Lead Scoring Implementation
If all these elements are in place, then your business is ready to hit the ground running. Now
is an excellent time to bring lead scoring into your business marketing plan.
About the author
Bethany Handy
Bethany is the Dallas Fort Worth HubSpot User Group Leader. She is the Founder and
President of ClosedWon, a Marketing and Advertising Company in Fort Worth, TX.
