The Intersection of Sales and Marketing: LEAD SCORING

With the challenge of delivering quality leads confronting marketers every day, once again the focus returns to lead scoring. More than just numbers, lead scoring is the true intersection of sales and marketing as it defines what makes a quality lead, how to recognize it, and what to do about it.

If your company doesn’t already have a lead scoring system in place, or if you do and it isn’t working out too well, we recommend you download Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring.It is a great resource and will take you through each step of creating an effective lead scoring system.

Before you dive in, here are a few tips on effective lead scoring:

·Include both explicit and implicit criteria. Explicit criteria are the data points that the prospect expresses or declares to your company directly. Implicit criteria are the behaviors the prospect exhibits when interacting with your organization (website clicks, submitted forms, event attendance). Both are key to determining how interested your prospect is and how close they are to making a buying decision.

·Stay balanced. Always keep the prospect’s BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) in mind while remembering that BANT is based on information that the prospect provided to you. Let the behaviors of the prospect provide even more insight into sales readiness. And remember to not weigh the individual prospect’s characteristics above those of their organization.

·Your lead scoring system will never be done. That is to say, you must constantly update, change and evolve your criteria to stay relevant and meaningful with your target as they respond to market conditions. Adjustments to lead scoring must also be made according to the reality of your sales team’s experience. In fact, some scoring systems allow for sales to adjust the lead’s score and send it back to marketing for reassignment.

·Without buyoff from sales, you’ve got nothing. It’s very, very important that your lead scoring system is born out of a sales and marketing meeting of the minds. If sales doesn’t approve of how you are ranking leads, they won’t view the leads as credible and won’t follow up. This also applies if you aren’t refining your scoring criteria based on the sales team’s feedback.

Lead scoring plays a pivotal role that forces the cooperation of sales and marketing like no other. If you do not yet have a scoring system in place, consider creating one. They can be as straightforward as our Lead Qualification Checklistor as layered as those outlined in Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring.

Remember: effective lead scoring makes sure your sales team is working on real prospects before your competitor’s do.