Efficient sales in general often narrows down to pitching your products to the right prospects at the right time.

‘Right prospects’ and ‘right time’ are very relative terms. What might be the right prospect to one sales rep mightn’t be to another.

Lead scoring helps quantify and streamline these otherwise relative measures. 

Lead scoring is a yardstick to identify the most sales-ready prospects from the rest. 

This score can be based on the Lead’s level of engagement with the sales rep.

This scoring is pretty simple to interpret. 

How to differentiate a sales-ready lead from the rest?

High quality lead: If a lead’s engagement rate is high— replies to your emails, answers your calls or asks for feature and pricing collateral, he is a high quality lead. You can choose to give a positive score to such sales ready leads. 

Unnurtured lead: But say a lead has unsubscribed from your email, it means he is less likely to buy from you. So, you can choose to give a negative score to such leads. 

This way you can quickly identify the ‘right prospects’— ones with the highest lead score from ones who need more nurturing.

Important: This score is not an absolute value. It’s a percentile and varies based on the scores of your other Leads.

For example, say you have 4 leads at present, Amy, Jerome, Cathy and Lara. And Amy’s score reads 99. This means Amy is better than the other three Leads by 99%. 

If her score is 78, it means 22% of the total leads are better than Amy.

Also, Increase or decrease in a lead score may not necessary be due to a negative activity as such. Even a lead’s inactivity when compared to the other leads can affect the lead score.

What are its main benefits?

1. Consistency:

It’s only the Admin of the account who can decide the margin for a hot, warm or a cold lead. So, there is a sense of consistency within the team while referring to the quality of a lead.

2. Flexibility:

All lead fields (default + custom) can be used as a lead scoring criteria. This gives the Admin the flexibility to configure and score leads to suit their sales process. 

Learn how to configure the Lead score for your business!