How to Qualify Your Leads Properly from Your Marketing Campaigns

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How do you make sure that you can qualify your leads properly? Is it enough that you have a lead scoring method and a score sheet? The answer is no. It is important that even in the earliest parts of the lead management process, you can already streamline your prospects. This way, you will have more qualified leads for your marketing campaigns. 

Here are a number of tips to help you out:

1. Develop a good communication plan. One of the best ways to reach out to your leads and start qualifying is to communicate. However, with so many methods of doing so, the communication process can be very time-consuming. What you can do, though, is to try to combine as many as 3 of these communication strategies in one full blow. For example, if you want to create a press release, you may want to schedule it during a charity event or a trade show. This way, you can obtain lead information from your press release as well as from the registration form of attendees of your booth during the fair. 

2. Information must be related to your targeted niche. We are talking about those leads that you want to qualify in your marketing campaign. Usually, in an effort to obtain as many leads as possible into their business, owners tend to provide details that are not really necessary. One must remember that you cannot get all of them. In fact, once you start to qualify your leads, you will realize that only around 10 percent of them are qualified. The rest may have to be placed under your lead nurturing program. 

How can you make your information geared towards your chosen leads? You need to take a look at their profile and compare it with the product that you are selling. For instance, if you are selling a business mobile phone, your qualified leads are those who are always on the move or maintaining a virtual office. You are not really after the ones who have a home-based business. You can then feed your qualified leads the information that they need, such as the benefits of using a business mobile phone.

3. Create a centralized database. What do we mean by this? It seems like it has been a custom among businesses to develop a database according to their marketing campaign. They create a database for all those visitors in the trade show. There is another database for those who have responded to their direct mail marketing, and there is another one for the Internet leads. 

This is not good. It always creates a chance that there will be multiple entries for leads. This means that a prospect may have responded to your direct mail and also signed up into your mailing list. There are also times that the same prospect responded twice to your marketing campaign. 

What you can do—so it is easier for you to qualify your leads later—is to develop a centralized database. All your leads, regardless of how you obtain them, must be found in there.

There are already a lot of database programs that you can use. They can help sort out your prospects, so you end up with unique entries. 

Lead scoring is a very important process. Without it, you may end up making an offer to those who are not interested in making a purchase today or who are not keen in buying anything from you at all. Thus, you cannot afford to not do it right. With the tips and an effective lead scoring system, however, you can never go wrong. 

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Lead Scoring: How You Can Increase Your Sales and Productivity

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What is the importance of lead scoring? I believe that I have already tackled the benefits of it, but let me say it once again. With lead scoring, you can identify the high-valued leads. These are the ones that you need to focus on during a particular marketing campaign or offer since they are also the ones who are going to buy from you. With lead scoring, you can follow the 80/20 principle. This means that 80 percent of the success of your business comes from the mere 20 percent of your total number of leads. 

Start by Filtering Your Leads

It is obvious that lead scoring can rake in profits for your business, but it is definitely not going to be a very smooth ride. This is especially true when you have a lot of leads to deal with. You have to filter them out using the criteria that you have developed. Just imagine working with around 500 of them. It will definitely be time-consuming. 

That is why you need to practice the science of lead scoring even when you are still gathering your prospect. You can do it by clearly defining your target market. For example, if you are offering baby-sitting services, you may want to make twenty- to thirty-year-old mothers with full-time employment are your main prospects. After all, they are the ones who have biggest possibility of availing of your services. 

To define your target market, meanwhile, you have to rely on research. It can be your own, through surveys, or previous data such as case studies and reports of independent organizations and companies. 

Effect Lead Scoring to Your Already-gathered Leads

Lead scoring should also be accomplished with the current leads that you have. As mentioned, you need to come up with your own criteria and even the most convenient lead scoring system for your business. You can gain inspiration, however, from what other companies did. (You can also read my entries about the various lead scoring methods.) 

Usually, lead scoring is based on a point system. Every activity that leads to sales will be given its own value, depending on its significance. For example, if you have a website and someone opens it, you may give this 2 points. However, if the Internet user browses on your Products page, you may allocate this activity 5 points. This is because it brings the customer a lot closer to making a purchase. You may also give higher points if he decides to communicate with you through e-mail or phone call because it illustrates his interest to your offer. 

Do Not Rely on the Software Too Much

The lead scoring software is definitely not a demi-god. It is just a simple tool that permits you to achieve organization into your lead scoring process. You can have the list of leads and their corresponding values. The application may also allow you to re-arrange or sort them from highest to lowest.

But their effectiveness is highly dependent on the process itself and how you implement it. If you have a very weak lead scoring system or you do not have one at all, the program will remain a technology that’s left unused. 

Should You Train Salespeople to Score Leads?

The answer to this question is yes. They are the ones who will be communicating with these prospects. When they know that such leads are of high value, they will understand the significance of every negotiation. They will be able to pattern their sales skills according to the needs of their prospects. 

Lead scoring increases your revenue without so much effort, time, and money.

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Basics of Classifying and Assigning Priorities to Leads

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Do you wonder how is it that marketers are able to accurately give out the right marketing materials to the right person without ever making mistakes? When you are handling a lot of leads, after all, it can be quite difficult to remember what to advertise to someone. The answer to that is lead classification and lead prioritization. 

The Importance of Lead Classification and Lead Prioritization

As a marketer yourself, it is important for you to understand the importance of lead classification and lead prioritization. It is important also to understand the roles it plays in the whole process of lead nurturing and management.

Lead prioritization and classification are indeed very important. Through these two processes, you can accurately segregate your leads and decide what exactly to do about them. It helps you to streamline your lead management process because you are able to assign the right leads to the right persons to handle them. By organizing your lead database, you are not looking at a clutter but an organized stack of papers, figuratively speaking. 

To get a further look at lead classification as well as prioritization, let us define each process to understand them better and to apply them effectively in your lead nurturing system.

Lead Classification

Lead classification is the process of segregating leads according to several relevant factors. There are several criteria according to which leads can be classified and grouped, and these include the following:

Category. The category is basically just the campaign category through which information about the lead has reached your attention. This criterion is generally useful when measuring the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. 

Product. The product criterion, on the other hand, signifies what product or niche the lead is interested in. This is directly useful in categorizing what products and offers should be sent next to the lead so that you can follow up on their interest to give them something else they might be interested in. 

Relationship. This criterion just defines the relationship this lead has with you or the company you are handling lead management functions for. Values for this criterion would generally be Existing Customer or New Customer. 

Level of confidence. This measures your level of confidence in the lead. Lead score is usually utilized for this criterion, as a lead score is the measure of the probability that the customer will buy the product being offered to him. The higher the lead score, the higher the probability of a purchase would be. In a way, a marketer is also highly confident that the customer will close a deal when offered. 

Lead Prioritization

Once the leads are classified and organized, they should be given a priority rating. With a priority rating, salespersons as well as marketers would know or judge what to do with the lead. There are several factors that marketers consider when applying priority ratings to their leads; these factors differ with the business model that the company applies and how they treat or assign importance to their leads. 

For example, if a company thinks that a lead that has an existing relationship with it should be prioritized, then a high priority is assigned to that lead. Otherwise, if it thinks that the new customer should be treated more importantly, then new customers are assigned high priority ratings. The considerations in assigning priorities to leads depend solely on the preference of the company. 

In other words, the formula for arriving at a priority rating for a lead is dependent on one or two factors that have more weight in accordance with how the company handles and considers its possible clients.

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How the Source of Leads Can Affect the Score

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Leads are harnessed from the Internet. Because of the Web’s scope, it is quite puzzling for someone who does not understand the process. How is it that marketers, despite the anonymity and the scope that the Web encompasses, can still measure and find out which person is most likely to buy his products or which product deserves to be nurtured first before being presented with an offer?

The answer is lead scoring. Lead score is the gauge in which the marketer finds out how interested the person is and how high is the chance that he will become a customer when extended with an offer. Lead scoring is given through points, and the amount of points assigned to every level of interest varies from marketer to marketer.

However, what is certain is this. There are activities that a marketer undertakes in his lead generation efforts that can determine the level of interest that a person has for a product. 

The Process of Lead Scoring

The first step in the process is done by the lead itself. He submits a lead, by entering contact or e-mail information into a form. There are many ways that a marketer can do this, but that is beside the point. The point here is that the lead is submitted by the potential customer himself. 

After the lead is submitted, that’s where the marketer comes in. After receiving the contact information from a lead, the marketer than uses the information to contact him and extend some offers. Most of the times, this is not the actual offer, but instead, the marketer sends a free and limited offer that he might be interested in. Call it a trial membership or purchase, if you may. If the lead responds positively, he or she is assigned higher score points to his account. If he doesn’t, his score remains the same and is left for consideration for another offer. The process is repeated again and again until the lead buys the product or until he opts out of the campaign. If the lead’s score still does not improve after several follow-ups, the lead is dropped out of the marketing automatically. 

The Source Is Important

As you can see, the time the offer is received is the most instrumental and the most important in the process. It is here that the first points are awarded to the lead and where the marketer bases his efforts for lead nurturing on. It is here that the marketer can first gauge how much the lead is interested on his offers just by checking where the lead information came from. Here’s how it goes.

Let’s say you have two advertising campaigns to find a lead on who’s interested in a house and lot. One campaign entails enticing leads through article submission and frequenting forums attended by people interested in buying a house and lot. Of course, you can generate leads to your website through these activities, but you can also do it another way. 

For example, you can also go on a different tactic: try using bogus advertisements about a raffle to win a house and lot. Naturally, people will indeed sign up for that offer. Who wouldn’t want to win a free and fully paid-up house and lot? 

Although it holds the same result, generating leads, both activities result in different lead scores. That’s because each advertising campaign takes advantage of a different interest. For example, the first campaign capitalizes on the person’s interest to buy a house and lot. That in itself deserves a higher score than the second campaign, which merely draws lead from persons who are interested in a free house and lot rather than buying one. Both groups require different efforts to convince to buy. 

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Lead Scoring 101

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Lead scoring is just one mechanism that marketers came up to gauge how qualified a lead is to receive more of the offerings that they are sending him, or how qualified he is to receive a first-time offering from the company. Lead scoring is usually done automatically with a lead tracking software, but it can also be done manually.

The criteria for lead scoring are based on the activities of a certain user. These activities are used as measures for that person’s interest in your niche market, or his interest in something that is closely or even remotely related to your niche market. Salespersons then act on that credit score with follow-ups or first-time offerings.

How Lead Scoring Came About

Lead scoring actually is a recent marketing innovation. Previously, marketers rate and classify their leads with a fixed grade--for example, Interested, Somewhat Interested, or Not Interested.

The problem with this is that the individual grades are ambiguous. They do not clearly show how interested the party is with the product; in between the Interested and Somewhat Interested, there exists a few other grades that could look better into the degree of interestedness that the person has. For example, he could be highly interested in the information, but not so highly interested to buy the product. That’s the harsh reality of business.

However, marketers had to live with the frustration and the feeling that they’ve wasted their time on a lead that is said to be “Interested” in the product but is actually interested only in the information. Thus, they had to find some way to gauge the person’s interest in the product. With that, lead scoring was born.

How Lead Scoring Works

This is how lead scoring works. Let us take, for example, a scenario:

John logged in to your piano-learning website and starts browsing your content. Your system automatically assigns him a score of 5. Then he downloads a free lesson in PDF format from your website, signifying that he is willing to find out more about your product offerings, or alternatively, he signs up for your newsletter. You add 10 points to his lead score, which qualifies him for an offer. Thus, in between your weekly or daily newsletters, you send him an offer to sign up for your full product or full piano lesson course. Depending on his response, you can add points to his credit score or keep it as is until he responds favorably.

The bottom line is this: lead scoring was devised to show how high the person is in your hierarchy of potential customers. Instead of an ambiguous grade assignment, you get a quantifiable grade that can accurately grade how interested the person is in your product. It helps you know which marketing techniques to employ or how he is to be handled by your sales team.

Advantages of Lead Scoring

As you could see, lead scoring has several advantages to your marketing campaign.

For example, it greatly enhances the accuracy of your lead tracking. Scores are assigned using the person’s activity as a base. The system will not assign a point or points for a lead without him doing an activity that signifies his interest in the product.

With this score, a lead can be assigned to a sales agent who is specifically tasked to capture his interest more. If he is highly interested or has high points assigned to him by the computer, then he is assigned to the sales agent assigned to offer the product. If he shows a bit of interest or has been assigned a mediocre score, the lead is transferred to a marketer who is assigned to send him e-mails that will make him more interested to buy.

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Establishing the Relationship between Your Demographics and Lead Scoring

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What is lead scoring? This is one of the most important processes in lead management. The goal of this is to ensure that you can narrow down your hundreds or even thousands of leads to a select few. You want to make sure that you only get to deal with those who have higher chances of buying your products or availing of services.

With that, you need to come up with a set of criteria that can help define your sales-ready leads. For example, if you’re selling children’s clothes, you may give more importance to women than men, since the former are fervent shoppers. But you will definitely provide more points for pregnant women. They are most likely to purchase clothes immediately for their upcoming child. It doesn’t matter how many points you associate for every factor. The most important thing is that it becomes a lot easier for you to determine if a lead is ready to make a purchasing decision.

The Use of Demographics

Usually, when you’re assessing your leads for the purpose of scoring, you make use of its demographics. The data will pertain to the characteristics of a certain population. We are talking about their age, income, race, educational background, employment status, and geographical location. We are also referring to the current interests or preferences of individuals.

Businesses make use of demographics to create a demographics profile. A profile is a combination of different characteristics. Using the example we have above, a demographic profile of your lead could be a woman in her 20s and 30s, working class, and pregnant. You can then use your demographic profile to identify the leads that you are going to work on. Of course, those who fit these criteria become your pre-qualified leads.

Types of Demographic Data

There are countless categories of demographic data, and some of them have already been mentioned in this article. Nevertheless, there are more. Because we really can’t discuss everything here, we can just classify them into general ones. First, we have explicit demographic information. As its name implies, these are the ones that are being provided by the lead. These include their name, age, address, telephone number, e-mail address, and race. Depending on what other information that you need, you may also include salary range, educational background, and geographical location here.

Then we have implicit demographic data. These are the information that you can get when you are going to monitor the interest and movements of your leads. Usually, to obtain these data, you have to make use of some tools, such as analytics software. You need to assess how many times a lead visited your website, checked your e-mails, or stayed in your web page. You may also include the number of times he placed a call to your customer service department.

If you are in a brick-and-mortar business, implicit data may include the number of visits a potential customer makes in your shop or the inquiries he placed over certain items. One of the clearest indications of his interest to buy would include testing the item on himself.

You Need to Use Both

There are some companies that would settle for explicit data, simply because the information is already there. Gathering and interpreting your implicit information definitely take a lot of time. However, if you want to make sure that your lead scoring model is comprehensive, you may want to use both. In case you don’t know, there are a number of leads who will not be perfectly honest with their own information. The reason can be deliberate or not. With the use of your implicit data, you can have a clearer picture of their capacity of being a customer to your business.

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5 Key Steps in Developing Your Own Lead Scoring System

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Why do you need to score your leads? Not all leads are created equal. Some of them may have very high interest over your products and services. Thus, they should be given higher priority. Others, on the other hand, may express the same sentiment as the first group. The problem is that they don’t see any particular need of what you’re offering right now. Then, you have leads that should have not been yours after all. They may have been misled by your sales letters or opt-in lists or that they may have completely changed their minds along the way. Their immediate needs have already been met.

The Best Lead Scoring System

There are plenty of lead scoring systems that you can follow. But you must realize that not all of them can be truly effective. Some of them may not work because your business has a completely different need. What you can do, though, is to come up with your own using the guidelines below:

1. Come up with criteria. The first thing to do in coming up with your own lead scoring system is to develop the factors that will help you determine which of them are of great value and which ones are not. One of the best ways is through customer behavior. If you have online leads, for example, you can make use of your lead analytics software. It will tell you where the leads are coming from, how long they stay in your website, the pages they visited, or how many times they visit your page. These data can be beneficial in identifying the level of interest of your leads over your products and services. Nevertheless, make sure that you can employ the help of your entire sales team. Since they are the ones who get to deal with customers and prospects, they already have a good idea of creating customer profile.

2. Weigh all your attributes. Not all of the factors will be very important to you. Some of them are highly indicative of the buying intent of the prospect, while others don’t. To make it easier for you, therefore, you need to assign values to them. It doesn’t matter if it’s numbers or letters. The most important thing is that they stand for something. For instance, you may give those important criteria the highest value and the least important ones the lowest one.

3. Determine their rates. When you have already identified the weights for all attributes, it’s time to identify the percentage of your hot leads. Normally, 20 percent and up will already do well. Then, you need to add up all the weight for your attributes. If the total highest score is 50, your sales leads should have a score of around 40 and up, before they can be considered as high value. Those who don’t meet along this range can be placed into your lead nurturing program.

4. Know what to do with the leads. When you have already categorized all your leads, it’s time to identify what to exactly do with them. Normally, those who are in the hot leads should be dealt with immediately. They are known for their very high conversion rate. There’s little to no amount of persuasion that has to be done. This could be because the product or service is something that definitely meets their needs. You also have to think about those who may belong to the lead nurturing program. What kinds of marketing strategies should you implement with them?

Lead scoring needs to be monitored at all times. Sometimes the factors change as the needs of potential clients change from time to time. Unless you are going to keep up, your system may eventually stop working.


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