It’s the goal of every marketer to send the most productive leads to their sales team. Like all business professionals, your sales team or dealers have a limited amount of time to produce revenue. In these tough times, when Sales is under pressure to generate as much revenue as possible, it’s important that your sales team and dealers spend time working only the leads most likely to convert.
What’s the best way to flush the great leads from all of the leads generated? Implement an automated lead scoring system that ranks leads and sends only the best leads to the sales force.
Sales will love the marketing department for sending hotter leads and the marketing will enjoy receiving kudos from Sales.
What is a lead score? It’s a numerical value assigned to every lead that predicts the lead’s likelihood to convert into a sale. The higher the score or rank, the more likely the lead will become a buyer.
Leads may be divided and ranked into categories by score. For example:
Ranked as A Leads (May be labeled as Hot leads) = Leads with scores 70 to 100
Ranked as B Leads (May be labeled as Warm leads) = Leads with scores 50 to 70
Ranked as C Leads (May be labeled as Future leads) = Leads with scores of 30 to 50
Ranked as D Leads (May be labeled as “Not Qualified) = Leads with scores under 30
How is a lead score created? The SmartLead automated system evaluates every generated lead based on a number of criteria and assigns the score. These criteria are customized based on a profile of a company’s most likely buyer.
For example, a lead for an accounting software company may be scored as follows, based on the inquirer’s answers to lead qualification questions:
- Job title: The more appropriate the lead’s job title, the higher the score. Buyers of this software may most often by chief financial offers, controllers or directors of accounting. These job titles may be worth 20 points toward the total lead score
- Time frame to buy: The closer the lead is to buying a product the higher the score. Example, if a lead says they plan to buy within one to three months the system may add 15 points to the lead’s score.
- Budget: Leads with an allocated budget to buy a product show a greater propensity to buy. This could add another 20 points to the lead score.
- Company Revenue: The software company knows that their products are more useful to companies with revenue over $10 million. Leads with revenues over $10 million will add 20 points to their lead score.
- Contact Me: Leads that request immediate contact may add another 20 points to their score.
This example produces a lead with a score of 95 — a Ranked A white-hot lead that should immediately be sent to the sales team.
At SmartLead we can also evaluate and rank leads by product and/or Boolean logic.
What happens to B, C and D ranked leads?
Leads ranked a B leads may immediately receive another communication from the company to take them from warm to hot. Perhaps a person with a non-decision-making job title is sent an electronic brochure with encouraging words to share the information with upper-level decision makers? Or, the message may include a special time-sensitive offer that will ensure the information is passed to upper level decision makers.
Leads ranked as C leads will be nurtured long-term, perhaps with a series of emails or calls from the contact center.
