However, not every lead that downloads something or fills out a contact form is sales ready or ready to be contacted by a salesperson. The leads that haven’t shown specific enough interest or you don’t know enough about them to see if they match your persona, shouldn’t be forgotten about or written off. They should be nurtured and their activity tracked.
The question we are often asked is “how do I keep track of all my leads that aren’t sales ready?” Great question: the answer is lead scoring.
Lead Scoring assigns a point value to specific activities that take place on your website by leads in your contact database and compiles the scores and assigns each lead a “score.” Activities that you can assign points to are numerous, but a few of the best categories to score for include their website activities and information about the lead such as which company they work for.
Note that if you ask all of the important questions that would tell they are a qualified lead the first time they came across a contact form you might not get many leads. It’s recommended that you build this profile over time and progressively ask questions of your leads. This way each form can have new questions and you learn more about your leads each time they fill out a form. Hopefully this will help to give you the information you need to determine if they are a marketing qualified lead or not.
The end result of setting up lead scoring is that it will help to identify leads that initially provided little reason to call them at first and give you additional leads to hand over to your sales team.
There are some rather sophisticated lead scoring techniques, alerts, and scoring processes that you can put in place, and it’s best to work with someone that has done it before so that you are scoring for the right criteria and finding the needles in your contact haystack. Once you start to see these new leads come to your attention you will realize that lead scoring is something that you have to have and can’t live without. Having leads that fill out several forms or ask for a consultation are great… but leads that don’t fill out as many forms, but are just as qualified, can’t be overlooked and count just as much. So a quick way to increase the number of qualified leads you are following up on, lead scoring!