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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