Michael Epps Utley 
Want to make your sales process more efficient and effective? Who doesn’t?
Lead scoring is a crucial way to do that.
This guide explains everything you need to know to score your leads so you can make those more likely to convert a top sales priority and waste less time on those who are unlikely to buy something.
What Is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring involves assigning values (typically numerical points) to the leads your business generates to determine the likelihood of them becoming customers.
You can score leads based on many factors, including information submitted on a lead form or data collected as visitors navigate your website and interact with your brand.
Lead scoring helps business owners, sales reps, and marketers prioritize leads, respond to them effectively, and increase conversion rates.
This guide explains the fundamentals of lead scoring and how to implement it in your organization.
Why Use Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring allows you to prioritize leads and focus your marketing and sales efforts on those most likely to become customers. In today’s challenging economy, converting every lead possible is critical.
Businesses that don’t practice lead scoring — and using the information that comes out of it — are likely spreading themselves too thin, chasing after all opportunities and not focusing more on good ones.
Lead Scoring Models
Here are six different lead scoring models. Each is based on the type of data collected from prospects.
1. Demographic Information
If you only target people within a specific demographic, such as parents of young children or C-suite executives, include demographic questions on your landing page forms. You can use the answers to determine how good a fit leads are for your business. Subtract points from your scoring for people who fall into a category you don’t sell to. This will help identify people your sales reps shouldn’t waste their time with. For instance, if your business is a home contracting service, and the prospect doesn’t own a home, they should be prioritized below people who do.
2. Company Information
If your business sells to other businesses (B2B), you’re probably more interested in selling to organizations of a specific size, type, or industry. If that’s the case, ask questions about those factors on your landing page forms. Give points to answers that align with your target audience, and take points away from those that don’t reflect what you're looking for. Leverage the scores to focus sales efforts on businesses more likely to purchase from yours.
3. Behavioral Data
How visitors engage with your website can tell you a lot about their interest in purchasing from you and what they’re likely to buy.
Start by reviewing leads that became customers, asking yourself:
Which offers did they respond to?
How many offers did they check out?
Which pages — and how many — did they visit on your site before purchasing something?
Develop a scoring system that favors high-value page visits and other behaviors and takes points away from activities that don’t result in closed deals.
4. Email Engagement Data
When a prospect opts in to receive emails from your business, you likely know very little about them except that they have some interest in your brand. However, over time, open and click data will give you a clearer picture of their interest level and what they’re interested in. Score your email data in a way that allows you to inform your sales team who is most likely to buy and what they should focus their sales efforts on.
5. Social Media Engagement
In most cases, people who are active on your social media are more likely to become customers than those who are not as involved with your brand.
Review your social media activity, asking yourself:
How often did they click on your company's social posts?
How many times did they comment on or share your content?
Setting up a scoring system based on social media interactions could help your sales reps identify hot prospects.
6. Spam Detection Data
This is the most basic lead scoring tactic. Give negative scores to people who filled out landing page forms in ways that seem spammy. For instance, they're probably not a good lead if they fill in any form fields by typing four or more letters in the traditional “QWERTY” keyboard side-by-side. Or, if the lead includes a bogus email address, they should be kicked out of the sales system.
To select the lead scoring system that’s right for your organization, work with your sales team to determine which data is most closely tied to sales success.
How to Calculate a Basic Lead Score
Here is the simplest way to calculate a lead score.
Calculate the lead-to-customer conversion rate for all your leads. Take the number of new customers you acquire divided by the number of leads you generate. Use this conversion rate as a benchmark.
Determine the customer attributes that resulted in high-quality leads. Leverage the information in the previous section as inspiration for selecting your attributes and behaviors.
Calculate the close rate of each attribute. Figure out how many people become qualified leads and customers for each attribute and action.
Compare the close rates of each attribute with your average close rate and assign point values accordingly. Identify the attributes with close rates significantly higher than your average. Give them the highest scores and scale your scoring down from there. Base the point values of each attribute on the magnitude of their individual close rates.
For example, suppose your overall average close rate is one percent, and your close rate for requesting a demo is twenty percent. In that case, the rate for the requested demo attribute is twenty times that of your average close rate — so you could, for example, award 20 points to leads with those attributes. Then, assign points relative to your average, highest, and lowest-ranking attributes. Attributes performing below your average can be assigned negative points, subtracted from your total.
Lead Scoring: The Bottom Line
There are other methods to score leads beyond the basic model explained in the previous section. However, the basic model is a solid foundation for launching a lead scoring system. Use it along with the other information in this guide to start a lead scoring program at your business. It’s a significant step toward making your sales process more efficient and effective.
