By Lisa J. Cramer

In this article, you will learn:

1. That a lead scoring system will help improve the effectiveness of your sales force;
2. That an effective lead scoring system can be improved by following four key recommendations.

If your Sales team loves your ABC lead-ranking system because it really works, good for you. Stop reading and get back to generating leads.

However, if your Hot-Warm-Whatever system is leaving the Sales team cold, there is a better way. Lead scoring helps maximize sales resources to deal with numerous leads, including those needing immediate action and those needing prolonged attention.

Lead-scoring systems let you assign point values to leads based on their behaviors such as:

• Responses to e-marketing campaigns such as pages viewed and time spent on each page
• Seminar or webinar signups and attendance
• Expressed or perceived need for your products and services

To get started with leading scoring, here are four key recommendations:

• Keep it simple. No one devises a perfect system from the start. Your system will never be perfect, but it will improve with each marketing effort. Get started with a plan to review results and tweak as you go.
• Why not 100? Don’t form a task force to determine your scoring scale. If in doubt, start with 100 points as the maximum and assign values to behaviors so that a lead requiring immediate action gets 75 or better. That leaves some room for hot, hotter, hottest from say 75 to 100. Same goes for a range of leads needed nurturing, say 40-74.
• It’s all relative. Much more important than the scale is the relative value of behaviors including signups, downloads, events attended, web pages viewed, and time spent on pages. List all the possible behaviors, assign a value for each, and then test a few scenarios to determine if certain behavior score groupings warrant immediate action or nurturing.
• Automate score to action. Lead-scoring tied to an automated system empowers you to generate action items based on lead score. The hottest leads go directly to Sales with other scores triggering nurturing actions, such as an e-newsletter or an invitation to a webinar.

Over time and based on detailed reviews of marketing efforts, you’ll determine the right system that brings sales results as well as the trust of your Sales team.

Lisa Cramer is President of LeadLife Solutions, a provider of on-demand marketing automation software that generates, scores and nurtures leads for B2B marketers. For more information, go to www.leadlife.com, or call 1-800-680-6292.

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