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May 30, 2024
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Cameron Smith
Lead scoring is the process of assigning numerical values to your leads, usually based on actions or demographics. By assigning values to leads, companies can quickly determine the quality of their leads.
There are dozens of lead scoring examples, but a simple lead scoring process might look something like this:
With an effective lead scoring system in place, companies can figure out how to best spend their time and prioritize how much attention each lead should get. For example, a marketing department may decide that they'll only send leads that score 50 points or higher to the sales team.
This way, the sales team knows they're only interacting with medium-to-high-quality leads. They won't feel discouraged by working through an endless list of leads who likely will never convert. This incentivizes them to be thoughtful with their outreach to each lead, resulting in a much higher conversion rate.
Depending on your company's goals, putting together a lead scoring system can be incredibly complicated or pretty simple.
In most situations, the marketing and sales teams within a company work together to decide which lead data or actions are the best predictors of that lead becoming a customer.
Lead actions include things like opening an email, calling the company, or requesting information. Lead data can be details like job title, income, or location.
For example, a company selling solar panels might want to give points to factors like:
Then, the company must assign points to each action or piece of data based on its importance. For example, house size might be worth 10 points, while earning over $100k per year could be worth 30 points. Once a lead reaches a certain point threshold, they're passed over to the sales team, and a rep can follow up with a phone call, email, or visit.
Companies set up lead scoring rules in various ways, depending on their goals. What matters most is that they each find a way to qualify leads and have the resources in place to build out a sustainable system.
Here are eight popular lead scoring methods sales leaders use across industries:
This model awards points to leads based on actions they may take, such as:
With implicit lead scoring, you'll have to decide which actions are most important to your company. For example, using the chatbox may mean high interest, but opening an email might not mean as much.
Many companies love to use implicit lead scoring because a lead can turn from cold to warm over time. Based on their information, a lead may seem like a lower-quality lead at first, but if they start clicking emails, attending webinars, and visiting the website, they're saying with their actions that they're interested.
Here, your lead scoring formula is based on the information a lead explicitly gives you or that you can collect about them. This can include:
Of course, this list will vary based on whether you're in the B2B or B2C space — company size doesn't apply if you sell ceiling fans to homeowners. But let's say your company provides large-scale hosting solutions for businesses; a lead who's a CTO and works for a company with 500+ employees would earn a super high score.
Explicit lead scoring has its pitfalls though, as many contacts will use inaccurate information in forms simply to learn more about your company. Or, they may put in a very low income because they don't want to get called. This is why many companies use both implicit and explicit lead scoring tactics to create a more accurate lead score.
Manual lead scoring means that someone keeps a spreadsheet and puts in scores as leads take new actions or the company gets more information about the contact.
This strategy would really only make sense for a smaller company that deals with few leads. For example, a person in charge of fundraising at a small charity might keep a list of 20-30 donor leads in a spreadsheet. It wouldn't be difficult to track leads by hand in a case like this.
Or, consider a one-person company or a sales rep acting as an independent contractor. That person might not have the resources to set up automated lead scoring but can handle scoring leads individually for the time being.
Here's another simple model: Calculate your lead's score based on their interaction with your email list.
For example, if someone opens an email, maybe they get five points. If they click on a link, they get 20. If they respond to an email, they get 50. If they don't interact with any email for a month or unsubscribe, their lead score drops to zero.
This works well for companies that do most of their marketing through email. If you generate a ton of leads through paid advertising or another channel, sometimes email lead scoring is just the method for you because when a low-quality lead takes another action on a different channel, they truly prove their interest in your brand, products, or services.
Note: It's much more straightforward to set up this style of lead scoring than many other lead scoring methods, making it particularly effective for companies with fewer resources.
This model can be a simple solution for companies that focus most of their marketing efforts on social media.
Let's say you're a personal chef who finds most of your new customers via social media. You can develop a simple lead scoring model that looks like this:
Then, once someone hits a threshold (say, 30 points), you can message them and say, "Hey, I've noticed you hanging out on my page and interacting a little bit. What's got you interested in my personal chef endeavors?" The downside here is that you won't get the full picture of a lead. But in the right industry, it can at least help you know who's worth messaging and pick up on patterns over time.
A useful lead scoring strategy should also take into account actions that make a lead less likely to buy. In these cases, you would assign negative point values.
This could look like:
In addition, you might want to consider actions that fully disqualify the lead from your services. For example, if you only provide services in Utah, and you get a lead from Arizona, it doesn't matter how much money they make or what actions they take.
In those situations, you can delete them from your database, make a note that they are disqualified, or give them a huge negative score, like -1,000.
Predictive lead scoring is often an enterprise-level solution that uses software to set lead scoring parameters for you and adjust them over time based on which deals close.
A predictive lead scoring model takes in tons of data points, such as the actions and demographics of all your users. It analyzes both leads that purchased and leads that didn't, absorbing all of that data and using AI to create a lead scoring system from scratch. Then, over time, it will intake more data from new leads and adjust the lead scoring criteria as needed.
This is the most effective lead scoring example featured in this blog post, but it's also the most resource-intensive. It's expensive to buy a solution like this, but for certain organizations, it's worth it.
Some companies use multiple lead scoring systems, especially if they generate different types of leads. Consider a company that acts as a middleman between real estate investors and fix-and-flippers. That company should have different lead scoring criteria for recruiting those two different types of leads.
Lead scoring can seem like a lot of work, but CRMs can help you track and score leads without the headache. Here's how you can automatically score leads without leaving Gmail:
Streak is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that integrates directly with your Gmail inbox. Streak allows you to track leads, manage your contacts, and (as I just mentioned) score your leads.
Get started in minutes by customizing a pipeline template or creating your own from scratch. Add each step of your process that you'll move leads through, as well as the data points you want to track.
Once you have a pipeline, use the columns to track specific data points for each lead. For example, you can have columns to track details like lead source, deal size, estimated budget, and decision-makers, along with other valuable lead scoring information.
Here's something cool: Streak AI automatically scans all of your emails with each lead and adds important details to your pipelines to save you time and make sure you never miss a detail. No more, "Have you updated the CRM?" Slack messages from your boss thanks to our powerful integrations and automation.
We're not all keen on writing code or creating formulas, which is why Streak AI does the heavy lifting. Create a formula column in your pipeline, describe the formula you need to calculate a lead score in natural language, and hit enter. Leave the coding up to Streak AI.
This formula may assign points to leads based on various data points or actions each lead takes. For example, you can assign a point value for each stage of your pipeline a lead's moved through, based on whether or not they've opened your emails, by their team size, or even by the channel they found you through.
Create a filter to show you leads with the highest lead scores so you can prioritize your day. As soon as a lead meets the lead score criteria, it'll be included in your saved view.
decision-makers
Start your 14-day free trial of Streak today to see how easy it can be to track, score, and prioritize your leads in Gmail.
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