As hundreds to thousands of leads come in through your website, it might feel like it is impossible to keep up with every one.
Are you honestly suppose to call them each multiple times, send them progressive emails, and set up appointments, especially when you already know that only 1 in 30 becomes a closed sale?
Some companies might do this, or they might have in the past. But a far better approach is through lead scoring.
Lead scoring allows you to assign a number to every lead that enters your system, based on their likelihood to purchase.
Before the internet or without technology this can be a rather strenuous activity, but with the help of softwares the process is now much more painless and fruitful for your sales department.
Getting Started With Lead Scoring
1 - Have a website that is generating leads, if you already have this, move on to step 2.
2 - Have a software program that can handle lead scoring, this is not a task you want to take on manually.
The software must work with your analytics and tracking programs to understand where the visitor came from, the search term used to find your site, how long they visited, the webpages and articles they read, any downloads they were both offered and downloaded, and of course their contact information.
The program you choose should also be able to notify or update the system when the lead receives emails, clicks in those emails, returns to the site, and does other activities.
3 - Assign a score to every possible action the visitor/lead can take. The system will add these scores together as actions are taken, and it will notify you when a certain score ceiling is hit- indicating it may be time for sales to schedule a call.
4 - Actively read through results and watch the activities visitors are taking to be able to adjust the system accordingly.
What Lead Activities Are Most Important For Scoring?
Sometimes it isn’t one specific action that is more important than others, but the steps in which those actions are taken.
For instance, a single visit to your site might not be worth a score at all, but a visit the day after they visited for an hour is worthy of noticing.
In general, getting the lead to enter information so that your company can contact them will be the first action that adds them to the system, this is because it is difficult to track them without knowing who they are.
Now as they read your emails, return to the site, and ask for other downloads each action becomes more important.
Based on the scores you’ve assigned to each action the lead can take, you should be pick a relatively high overall score where sales will be notified.
It’s actually a good idea to have the lead in the system when sales are first notified and when sales is notified to make a call or reach out personally to the lead.
This allows them to track promising leads without having to spend too much time on them until they are ready.Does My Company Need Lead Scoring?
It depends. If your company has dozens of leads coming in daily- yes, lead scoring will be beneficial.
If you are struggling to get a lead a week, you probably do not need a system in place to handle scoring- though it would be useful to see what leads are doing and where you are losing visitors before they become leads.
Getting started with lead scoring can be difficult, so if you have any questions at all, let us know. We might turn your question into our next blog post.
