Lead Scoring Info

How to Qualify Your Leads Properly from Your Marketing Campaigns

2009-04-10T11:11:00.000-07:00

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.

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

Lead Scoring: How You Can Increase Your Sales and Productivity

2009-03-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

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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.

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

Basics of Classifying and Assigning Priorities to Leads

2009-02-26T19:06:00.000-08:00

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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.

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

How the Source of Leads Can Affect the Score

2009-02-13T10:23:00.000-08:00

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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.

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

Lead Scoring 101

2009-01-29T21:54:00.000-08:00

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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.

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

Establishing the Relationship between Your Demographics and Lead Scoring

2009-01-16T08:21:00.000-08:00

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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.

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

5 Key Steps in Developing Your Own Lead Scoring System

2009-01-02T17:22:00.000-08:00

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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.

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

The Art and Techniques of Qualifying Sales Leads

2008-12-18T18:12:00.000-08:00

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Why do most lead management campaign fails? One of the foremost reasons is that they didn’t try to qualify their sales leads. They are still stuck with the generic script when they’re calling their prospects, even if they know that it’s still going to be “different strokes for different folks.”

To better illustrate the problem let’s come up with an example: you have a traditional script that is going to be used by all your sales agents to all kinds of leads. It will take around 10 minutes for a single sales agent to complete one call, and every day, he or she has to come up with around 25 appointments. Let’s just say that the script will not work with around 10 of your prospects. In the end, a sales agent is spending more than an hour getting nothing out of his job. It will also be very bad for business, as these sales agents are paid for every hour of work without getting the desired result. It will also be detrimental for the best sales agents who may feel very inefficient for not meeting the quota.

But how do you exactly qualify your leads and customize your marketing strategies to them? Let us count the ways:

1. Determine the people who will have the greatest need of your products. Not all leads will be interested in your products right away. There are also prospects who may not fit to the customer. Your challenge therefore is to identify which of them will have the greatest need of your product. Let’s pretend that you’re currently selling smart phones. You will have better chances of selling these gadgets to business owners who may see their features be very helpful in managing their businesses than to housewives, who really don’t need any of these functions unless they’re engaged in a home-based business.

2. Call them for appointment. When you’ve already identified the targeted prospects, you can now start corresponding with them. Now there are many ways on how you can communicate with them, and it depends on the kind of contact detail they can give you as well as other factors. For instance, it’s a lot easier for you to reach businesspersons through their mobile phone or e-mail since they are always on the move. Home-based businesspersons, on the other hand, can be reached through a phone call or fax. It’s very important that you don’t give the real reason of communication to them right away. As much as possible, they must be encouraged to set up an appointment with you. This way, you will have the chance to demonstrate or discuss the product to them more comprehensively. It will also remove the lead time that usually happens when they need to send in their question, and they still have to wait for your answer within 24 hours or even more.

3. Get their response. Depending on how you presented your product, not all will be interested in purchasing your product immediately. If this is the case, the best option is to ask for any feedback on the business or even in your manner of presentation. This will enable you to constantly modify your strategies and increase your conversion rate.

4. Call them again. Since they are still the priority of your business, they should be followed up. Give them some time to think and then call again. At least it would make them feel that they’re really important to your business. If nothing happens, it’s time to move on to the average-valued leads that you have.

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

The Relationship between Lead Tracking and Lead Scoring

2008-12-04T08:25:00.001-08:00

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Lead management is a very complex process. It involves four sets of activities that are all interrelated: lead tracking, lead scoring, lead distribution and lead nurturing. All of these start from lead tracking, and all of them have a relationship with that step. Let us discuss here how lead tracking is helpful for lead scoring.

How the Process of Lead Tracking Is Done

Lead tracking is the process of watching your prospects’ response to your marketing techniques. Are they responsive? Do they ignore your mails without even inquiring as to how it might interest them? All of these questions are answered during the lead tracking process.

Lead tracking takes place right away after the marketing mail is sent. Marketers then wait for responses from any of the people the mails were sent to. If someone responds with an inquiry or actually buys the product, he or she is placed on the list for people who are interested in the offer and people who are likely to make a positive reception of the next advertising mail.

Lead tracking can be done manually using an electronic spreadsheet, but most businesses nowadays prefer to use lead tracking software because it is very convenient and does not require any upgrades or changes if the business eventually grows in size.

The Information in Lead Tracking Leads to Scoring and Prioritization

We all know that lead scoring is the process of ranking leads according to their likeliness to purchase your product or service. The rank or score of a prospect determines what action the marketer will do next with respect to that lead. That’s where the information from lead tracking comes in. This is how sales leads are prioritized:

• If a lead responds with an inquiry to the advertisement, he or she can be considered as potential clients and will be assigned a score as such. Sales agents would be instructed to follow up quickly on this lead if he or she will be ultimately interested in buying the product.

• An unresponsive lead after a first-time mail would receive a score that will signify that he needs a bit more pushing until he buys the product. He or she is then assigned to sales agents tasked with follow-up advertising mails.

• A lead that purchases the product will then be placed on a list of potential buyers of upcoming products and offerings. Agents assigned to new products will have this lead on their list.

• A lead that has not responded to many mails is scored as “dead” and unlikely to be interested in further offerings. Depending on the company, this lead may be dropped from the list.

The bottom line here is, lead tracking is instrumental to the scoring. It provides lead scorers the information they need about the responsiveness or unresponsiveness of a certain prospect so that they can be assigned the appropriate priority and be accorded the needed action.

The Lead Tracking Software Does Wonders to Lead Scoring

Given their relationship, lead tracking programs are also useful to lead scoring. Benefits include:

• Information is processed faster and sent quickly to assigned personnel. Lead tracking programs automatically assigns a lead score to any prospect. All a marketer has to do is call up a list categorized according to lead ranking and proceed with lead distribution.

• Status information pertaining to the lead can be easily queried and updated. There’s no need anymore to look up individual files manually and assign them to the appropriate agent.

• Assessment of marketing and lead management efforts can be done expeditiously, efficiently and at less cost.

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

Scoring Leads to Determine Customer Relationship Depth

2008-11-19T23:22:00.000-08:00

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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

How to Prioritize Your Leads for Maximum Benefits and Minimum Effort

2008-11-06T18:49:00.000-08:00

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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

Finding a Deeper Meaning on Lead Scoring and How to Do It More Effectively

2008-10-09T21:16:00.000-07:00

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There has been a lot of confusion lately about lead scoring. Though a lot of people understand that it’s an important element in lead generation and prioritization, and that it can be an effective tool in getting better conversion rate for the business at the least amount of effort, money, and time, they still don’t know how it actually flows and how to do it more efficiently.

So what is lead scoring?

As its name suggests, it is merely giving points to your sales leads based on the criteria that you have set for your business or the product or service that you’re currently marketing. Normally, the assumption is that the higher the score the sales lead gets, the higher is his level of interest. Thus, if you’re selling something that he needs or desires, you will better luck with him than with those with much lower scores.

Let’s make an example. Let’s assume that you’re currently promoting your real estate business in Florida online. You have set up a website for it. If the visitor actually comes from Florida, you may assign the lead with 2 points. If he opens your website and gets to stay for few seconds, that can be an additional 4 points on his score. If he checks out the pages of your website, especially the photo gallery of your real estate properties, then that’s a huge 10 points for him. If you have a mailing list and he signs up, that’s an equivalent 20 points on his part, much bigger, of course, if he makes an inquiry over some of your Florida properties.

How do you get successful with lead scoring?

Lead scoring can be easy, if you know how to really do it well. The very first thing that you need to keep in mind is that there’s no such thing as fixed scores to give to your sales leads. You can ask even other sales lead or marketing experts, and they will tell you that there is no guideline to follow. The kind of score or points that you’re going to give for every action of your sales leads will clearly depend upon you. However, it would help if you can assign higher values to those that will make them one step closer to coming up with a deal with you.

It’s also very important to not limit yourself with the low scores, as there are a lot of outside factors that can affect them. For instance, your sales leads may be a type of person who doesn’t make any inquiry unless he has the money to get what he wants. Of course, at first, that’s a low score for him; but then, if you can contact him over phone, maybe he can tell you the reasons why, which will then allow you to negotiate a lot better. Having low scores therefore mean that they may not be your very first priorities, but sales agents still need to get in touch with them. After all, a sales lead is always a potential customer.

Most of all, don’t settle for whatever program you have devised when it comes to lead ranking. You can surely make use of a software that will make it a lot easier for you to keep tabs on your lead prioritization process, but the entire method should be susceptible to change, especially if better processes can be developed along the way.

Lead scoring doesn’t have to be too complicated. What is essential is that it can help you streamline the process of identifying leads that are of more weight than the others.

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

Classifying Your Leads: A Step in Lead Scoring and Ranking

2008-09-25T06:53:00.000-07:00

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Why is it very important for you to go through lead ranking or lead prioritization? There are too many reasons. First, not all leads are effective for your business, which means that there are just people who are not really interested in what you’re offering. If you have a mailing list to generate these sales leads, for example, there might be some of them who have accidentally listed their e-mail addresses. Second, even if your sales leads are potential leads, they still need to be classified according to your product segments. If you’re running an electronics website, not all of the leads will be buying cameras or mobile phones. Only a percentage of them will, and lead scoring will help you determine who these people are.

Common Classifications of Sales Leads

Before you can go on with lead prioritization or lead scoring, though, you have to come up with a set of criteria first. This way, it becomes a lot easier for you and you sales agent to classify every lead. To start with, you can classify your sales leads according to the following:

1. Product Segment. This is ideal for businesses that may be selling different types of products or offering variety of services. As mentioned, your sales leads may be interested in some products but not all. Thus, what you can do is to identify the product lines that you have and then check among the sales leads. You can make it more convenient for you if you can come up with different mailing lists for each product line.

2. Confidence Level. This talks about how easy or hard it will be for you to sell a particular product to your sales lead. The rule is that if the confidence level is high, you can expect easy lead conversion. The opposite will happen if the confidence level falls short. For instance, if you’re selling baby products online, you will have better chances with brand-new mothers than those women who have growing-up kids. When it comes to lead ranking or lead prioritization, those with highest confidence level should be the utmost priority.

3. Lead Value. This is perhaps the most basic classification level of your sales leads. All you need to do is to determine the worth of the lead based on the information that you have. Of course, those that are branded as high value should be the priorities of your sales agents, since it’s a lot easier for them to talk about products and services to high-value sales leads.

4. Existing Relationships. Your sales leads a few months ago can still be used as your sales leads now, especially if you have new products or services coming in. However, if you want to obtain greater success in this classification, you have to establish the relationship between your product now and the product before. For example, your sales leads who have bought or shown interest over coffee makers of a particular brand may also be worth checking out to once you start selling microwave ovens from the same company.

A Lead Prioritization Software Makes Things Easier

It may be a little surprising to know but there are still small-time companies that are doing lead scoring through the use of Excel sheets—that’s definitely not an issue, as long as you can manage it well. However, once your business starts to grow or you have too many leads to track, it becomes a problem. A lead prioritization program could be something that you need. You can assign values to your every lead and then sort them out based on their ranks.

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

Finding out How Your Leads Work for You: Lead Analytics and Performance

2008-09-09T00:31:00.000-07:00

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When you enter a particular marketing strategy, you would want to know how effective such a strategy is in creating the much-needed revenues your companies hanker for. This can be done with the use of lead analytics or lead performance tracking. Tracking and analyzing how your leads translate into dollars and cents can help you realize which types of leads are more lucrative for your business. The use of lead analytics is also ideal for those companies who want to streamline their marketing strategies to cover only the avenues that are in tune with the services and the products that they provide.

Lead analytics do not begin and end at the marketing side but continue on until a deal is concluded and a customer is billed. The analysis of how successful the lead is or how such a kind of lead can be beneficial to the company is often tracked from the beginning of the marketing process. You can say that the moment you and your company pitch the product to a prospective client is when the analysis of the program begins. It continues on to track how the prospect takes to the many different marketing tools you use to get them to essentially buy from you and your company. Analysis of the lead and the kind of lead that does succumb to your marketing ploys is often noted and taken into consideration by the company. Sometimes the performance of the agent who closes the deal is also taken into account when the analysis is being concluded.

The importance of lead performance tracking and the use of lead analytics is often seen in the decline or increase of sales for certain products and services as well as the rise and fall of the satisfaction of your leads. You can also find out the reasons why such a rise and fall is being seen in your marketing and what should be done or changed to remedy the situation. How you can determine where your marketing ploys fall off or are in need of major changes is done with the use of tools that show you the hows and whys of such a movement. Included in the tools used for such an analysis are scorecards or performance trackers that show you which sales team or marketing team is lagging in terms of producing favorable results for your company. Such an analysis will then help you determine a course of action that may involve a shifting around of personnel, a retraining of sales teams or marketing teams, a rethinking of strategies, and a whole lot of other solutions to address the poor performances that can be seen with your analysis.

If you are looking for a step up in the way you do your business and you wish to narrow down the areas where your sales and marketing strategies are lacking, you may want to consider putting a lead analytics program into your current setup. This kind of a program can help you effectively weed out the undesirable marketing strategies you may have put into place, help you determine who in your team is producing the kinds of results that you want and need, as well as find out why some of the people who work for you may be falling behind in terms of turning up revenues for the company. The use of such analytic tools can cut short the time it might take to figure out where you need to change things or where you need to focus your energies on to exact positive results. This is why more and more companies are looking to analytics and performance trackers to maximize their production capabilities.

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

Sales Prioritization: Determining the Real Value of Sales Leads to Your Business

2008-09-02T06:29:00.000-07:00

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It is definitely not a question that sales leads are very important for businesses. However, not all sales leads will be beneficial. That’s why it’s never enough to gather names. You have to filter them out until you can come up with your targeted sales leads.

Targeted sales leads are those individuals who have the highest interest to the product or service you’re offering. Since they already have the curiosity, it would not take long before you can sell your business to them. They are also the most eager to recommend you to their friends and family and would definitely be one of the loyal customers you’ll ever have in your company. Moreover, since you don’t need to spend more time with them in terms of your marketing efforts, you can definitely reduce your marketing costs.

But for you to come up with targeted sales leads among your thousands, you have to do one thing: lead ranking and lead prioritization.

Lead Ranking: the Different Categories of Sales Leads
So it becomes very easy for you to rank and prioritize your sales leads, it’s better to come up with categories. Each category, furthermore, should be properly described. Lead scoring is also an essential component during the categorization. The scores will be the basis of which of the following leads must be prioritized in terms of business marketing and promotion.

Here are a number of common classifications of your sales leads:

1. Far-off Leads. The profiles of these individuals are something that you really don’t know much about, only that they could possibly be interested of what you’re selling or offering to them. More often than not, they are not contacted by sales agents at all, and one needs more intensive research on them.

2. Sales leads from competitors. Your competitors can also be a great source of sales leads, and actually, it’s a good thing. First you don’t have to do much evaluating if they would have the same interest to your niche, considering that they have been customers of your competitors. You can also easily obtain their demographics. The problem, however, is that some of them may already be showing signs of loyalty to their company. It may take stronger marketing efforts before you can actually persuade them to be your customers.

3. Potential Sales Leads. If you happen to become part of a trade show or an exhibition, you may have come across individuals who show deep interest in your product or service, and if given a chance, they would love to get to know your business a little more. They are also vocal of potentially buying your product or using your service once you already go full blast into the market. It’s important that their contact details must be determined, as they can be one of the priorities among the sales leads.

Sales Prioritization: the Criteria
When you already have gone through the lead scoring, it becomes very easy for you to prioritize your sales leads. Nevertheless, it’s still important that you can compare the classifications with the different considerations that you can possibly use for your sales leads prioritization:

1. Existing customers should be one of the highest priorities. As much as possible, you should hold on to your existing customers, since they can definitely compose the bigger portion of your customer base. These are the ones that have already purchased a product from you and would definitely like to do a repeat. Moreover, these are also the best individuals to talk to when you have new products coming into the market. In reality, it takes less amount of effort to convince them to buy from you than when you’re marketing to fresh sales leads.

2. If there is time constraint, the sales leads should be treated with high priority. For example, if you’re running a marketing campaign that sales leads that purchase something from a given time period will be given 50 percent discounts, then these sales leads should be one of the priorities. Your goal is to make sure that they take the bait. Besides, convincing them to do something for you, either to buy a product or use a service, is the hardest. But once you’re over it, marketing with them is already somewhat convenient.

3. A sales lead that expresses great amount of interest is a priority. Interest is the start of everything, and when it’s basically very high, the sales lead should be a priority, so you can take action immediately. You don’t want his interest to wane.

Tip: Lead ranking and lead prioritization will be more convenient and systematic when you make use of a lead management software. You can easily group and filter your sales leads according to categories. The web-based ones can also be accessed by your sales agents, so they don’t end up ranking and scoring the same person twice.

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