Lead scoring aligns marketing and sales together in order to pinpoint exactly where each prospect stands in the sales cycle. To be effective the process must be a 100% collaborative effort between marketing and sales. Both interested departments will jointly define what constitutes a sales-ready lead. With sales and marketing aligned, everyone can agree on the leads that represent the most immediate revenue potential and focus directly on those leads to close sales. Enabling an effective lead scoring system empowers you to reach the right leads, at the right time, with relevant messages, and see better marketing results with dramatically shorter sales cycles.

This requires team work and collaboration

As you, the marketer, work with the sales team to define your lead scoring model, make sure you agree on information that can be captured, scored, and measured consistently over time. Otherwise, no one will trust the lead scores. But there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, choose from the types of information that are commonly used to score leads:

• Explicit

• Implicit

Explicit Scoring

Explicit scoring involves crafting numeric values for information that a prospect or lead provides you directly or can be verified through a 3rd party service. Typically this data captured off a Landing page Web form or imported from a clean marketing database, such as:

To score these data points, assign a value to each field of data. For example, if your ideal prospect is a VP from a company with revenue in the $100-500 million range, then prospects with those criteria receive top scores for each. A Director at a $50 million company would receive lower scores. To obtain the best possible explicit data about each prospect, ensure that the data in your marketing database is as recent and clean as possible. You should also identify data gaps to see what you are missing. Then take steps to acquire the missing data.

Implicit Scoring

Implicit scoring is based on data that you track or observe about a prospect or lead, such as web site activity. All of these behaviors of a prospect are referred to as his/her “implicit” information. In other words, implicit behavior defines a prospect’s behavior pattern as it relates to progressing toward a purchase. While most of this information can be captured via Web forms, you should include data on any touch points with a prospect. Your implicit lead score should include the following:

• Frequency of contact

• Timing of contact (recent or past)

• Type of action taken (e.g., attended an event, downloaded a white paper, opened an email, etc.)

• Visited a landing page via an PPC link

• Geographical location

Just as with your explicit data, assign scores for each type of implicit information you capture about a prospect, taking into account the frequency and recency of actions such as downloads, webinar attendance, and email click-throughs.

Organize score thresholds and actions into Lifecycle Stages

Once you’ve assigned scores, you can create a custom sales funnel tracker using our Lifecycle Manager. Your sales funnel is comprised of every stage that is associated with your sales cycle. These stages are typically defined by a score threshold, for example: Cold (Score: 5-25), Warm (Score: 26-50), etc. You can also specify actions or behavior that are required to qualify for stage, in addition to meeting the score threshold. For example, before a lead can move into a Lifecycle stage named 'Hot', they must have downloaded a priority white paper and visited a product and pricing page on your web site.

Click here to learn about Scorecard Rules & Conditions.