Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Scoring Leads to Determine Customer Relationship Depth

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When you need to find out how well you have been handling certain customers, you might have to use a system called lead scoring. This system helps you determine how well each lead was handled and whether or not the lead became a lucrative one. While this is a good enough system to have to keep track of leads, you might need to use lead scoring for more than just lead tracking to determine returns and results. If you are in a business where leads and customer loyalty is important, you might want to consider using lead scoring as a way to determine how deep your relationships with your customers are. This can help determine how well you not only handle your customers but how well their needs were answered and how much they value your services.

Lead scoring is essentially used to simply rank customers depending on what they do for your company or what their actions are on your site. When you use this kind of a system to score how deep your relationships are with your customers, you can then determine the course of action you should then take with the current score of certain customers. This use of lead scoring techniques to determine where you now stand with your customers is needed when some customers that used to be pretty lucrative for your business seem to have diminished their spending with your company.

You will have to remember that those clients and customers of yours that used to be on the top of your priority list due to the huge amount of revenue you get from them may not be producing as much revenue now as they did before and may need to be scaled down on your list or moved to a lead nurturing phase. Determining what course of action you need to take with present customers can be done with a lead scoring program you might already have in place. This does not mean, however, that you should drop the customers or leads that seem to be slacking off in terms of revenues that they used to bring in to your business. This simply means that you will need to move them to a nurturing stage where you can keep them informed of your company's latest products and services but minimize the interaction costs in these places for the meantime.

Corporate Clients

For those companies who handle clients that belong to one big entity or handle corporate clients, this scoring system can also help you assess whether or not the company that your clients work for is a good place to look for more leads. If you find that you have more than half a dozen clients who need your services or your products from just such a company, this can mean that you might find more of the same kind of people to tap as clients from the same place.

Using a scoring system like the lead scoring system you might already have or are planning on getting can help you find out if it is indeed a good idea to tap more leads within the same corporation or company. If your interactions with the people from these companies score high enough to show that there are possibilities there, then you can try and get more leads from the same avenue. If the scores from these leads are erratic and do not show a pattern that indicates a probability of good leads coming from that direction, you can either skip the idea or may just give it a try, depending on what you see from these results.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Thursday, November 6, 2008

How to Prioritize Your Leads for Maximum Benefits and Minimum Effort

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Who does not want to earn more with the least amount of effort being exerted? While some people might call this cutting corners, others can easily call it business and marketing savvy. Knowing how to score your leads effectively to find out which ones are the best leads for you to prioritize is probably a strategy that can work for you. How to score your leads, prioritize them and then handle them can be easily done and can help cut the time you use in handling leads by taking out the leads that appear like they will take you nowhere. Lead scoring should be considered by those who wish to maximize their efforts on those leads that show more promise than others. This means that if you wish to focus on those leads that are more lucrative than others, lead ranking and lead prioritization should be used.

How you score your leads and how you prioritize them gives you the edge over your competitors since you are essentially getting to those leads that are ready to convert before you tackle those other leads that need some more marketing work done on them. Lead ranking or lead scoring uses numbers instead of classifications when it comes to determining which leads are promising and which ones may not result in a sale or a conversion. While other marketing techniques that categorize leads into those which are ready to buy and which are caught in the middle and which need a bit of cultivation, lead scoring makes it infinitely easier to determine which leads will be earning for the company soon and which ones won't at the moment. This kind of a strategy also helps you determine which leads you will need to discard and which ones show promise despite a middle score or rank.

Determining the score of a lead and the ranking of a lead in terms of priority can actually be done with the use of software that tracks the movement of the lead within your website. This movement garners points and the total number of points a lead makes on a visit to your site can then be ranked accordingly. The ranking that your leads make can then be your basis for which ones you should follow up on first and which ones need to be encouraged more to purchase from you or visit your site again. When you prioritize leads that are ready to make you some money, and you can easily know this by looking at their score and their rank, you can then focus most of your sales savvy on those leads that are not quite ready to plunk down their cash but are somewhat contemplating doing so. Since leads that have high scores essentially are leads that are very interested in what you have to offer, you can then move in to close the deal with ease.

Lead ranking, lead scoring and lead prioritization can be used in a huge number of businesses where people may sometimes think twice about purchasing from you not because they don't want to or need to purchase what you have to offer. These people often hesitate to purchase from you off the bat because they are simply trying to see which provider of the service or product they want can come up with the best offer for what they want or need. In short, following up on leads that score high and rise to the ranks of your list can probably be easily convinced to buy from you if your sales team handles them with aplomb and the kind of sales savvy that can convince these buyers you are indeed the one they want to buy from.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com