SCORE! Send Winning Leads to Your Sales Channels

It’s the goal of every marketer to send the most productive leads to their sales team. Like all business professionals, the 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 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, the more likely the lead will become a buyer.

Leads may be divided into categories by score. For example:

• Class A Leads (May be labeled as Hot leads) = Leads with scores 70 to 100
• Class B Leads (May be labeled as Warm leads) = Leads with scores 50 to 70
• Class C Leads (May be labeled as Future leads) = Leads with scores of 30 to 50
• Class D Leads (May be labeled as “Not Qualified) = Leads with scores under 30

How is a lead score created? An 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 be 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 20 points to the lead’s score.

Budget: Leads with a budget allocated 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 15 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 Class A white-hot lead that should immediately be sent to the sales team.

What happens to Class B, C and D leads?
Class 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.

Class C leads will be nurtured long-term, perhaps with a series of emails or calls from the contact center. Class D leads may be unqualified and not worthy of follow-up.

Learn more about lead scoring.
Download an information sheet that explains how SmartLead customizes lead scoring and uses metrics to provide insights into lead scores.

Contact SmartLead to learn more at 800.735.3237 or sales@adtrack.com. We'll evaluate your current lead generation and distribution program and discuss how lead scoring could help boost revenue faster.