How Lead Scoring Works & Why You Need It

The following is an excerpt from IMPACT's ebook, "The B2B Marketer's Checklist for Accurate Lead Scoring." For more expert tips on implementing an effective strategy, and how it works, be sure to Scoring">check out the full ebook.

Sure, delivering more qualified leads to your sales team sounds great, but how the hell does it work?

Like most products or services that aim to make us more efficient, they're often met with a healthy dose of skepticism. It's part of the consumers mindset.

And honestly, for anyone whose stayed up late enough to catch a block of cheesy informercials, who could blame them?

But lead scoring works. And most importantly, there's no catch.

By utilizing software like HubSpot, you can easily attach a point value to your leads that perform certain actions or meet the specific criteria you've included as valuable to your sales process.

How Lead Scoring Works

Using the HubSpot software, you can assign scores to leads who either:

1. Meet certain demographic information, or

1. Perform certain activities on your website

While you can use any scale you’d like, we recommend keeping your points for any single activity between 0-100.

Using the custom lead scoring tool in HubSpot, you can assign a set of rules to be applied any time a lead completes an action that you deem important to the sales process.

For instance, perhaps anytime a lead visits your pricing page, the software will automatically assign them 40 points, as any lead who has taken an interest in your pricing structure is surely more qualified than those who have not, right?

By establishing a set of rules that automatically score your leads will have a significantly positive affect on your entire sales process.

Before You Get Started

This goes without saying, but before you can get started with any lead scoring strategy, it’s imperative that both your marketing and sales teams sit down and establish the criteria for what makes a qualified lead for your company.

Talk with your team and determine which demographics, activities, and behaviors make a lead more qualified, or what us marketing nerds like to call an MQL (marketing qualified lead.)

Which demographics are more likely to buy than others?

• CEO’s or other C-Level executives?

• Do they represent smaller or larger businesses?

• What kind of revenue are they bringing in?

This is the information you should be gathering from you lead capture forms.

Setting Point Values

Once you’ve clearly identified what makes a qualified lead for your company, you can more effectively develop a points system to assign values to the certain criteria that makes a lead qualified.

Determine What Score Makes a Lead Sales-Ready

Once you’ve successfully assigned point values for the criteria and marketing activities you’ve identified as important in qualifying a lead, decide at which point total should a lead be considered sales-ready.

And remember, the whole goal here is:

• To avoid scaring leads away before they are ready to speak with sales

• Make your sales process more efficient by enabling your sales team to work with only the most qualified of leads

Continue reading the full ebook...