As you work through setting up your sales funnel, you’ll want to start focusing more of your sales team’s effort on prospects that are most likely to convert. These are your “hot” prospects, and you can identify them using lead scoring.

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is a method you use to rank prospects so that the most interested and engaged prospects have the highest score. Many times businesses have no system to score leads. They rely on “gut instinct” or a random selection process, and end up losing money as a result.

Lead scoring is an important way of improving your sales funnel. It also helps you coordinate your marketing and sales departments. Many times your marketing department already knows what makes someone more likely to be your ideal prospect. It may be a certain level of engagement with email, a certain demographic, downloading a specific lead magnet, or something else entirely. When that information is formalized in your sales system, your sales representatives will know exactly who to spend their valuable time pursuing.

With lead scoring as part of your sales funnel, your sales representatives will be focused on hot prospects and won’t be taking time with someone who isn’t at all interested. Their sales numbers will increase, and you have less cost per sale. It’s a win-win situation!

How to Automate Lead Scoring

The first step in setting up a lead scoring system is to make sure that all the key departments in your company are involved. The smaller your company, the easier this is, but it’s especially important for larger businesses. Without all of the stakeholders on board, a lead scoring system won’t be implemented effectively, and you won’t get the results you need.

Next, find out from both sales and marketing who the best prospects are. You can do this by deciding first who you want to work with, and then set up parameters to identify the best folks in this group. You can also do this by determining what your best, most profitable customers already have in common. You’ll want to consider things like:

• What web pages on your site they have visited
• What types of information they request from you
• How they found you
• How often and where they interact with you
• What their purchasing timeline is

The list is far from exhaustive, and you’ll know best what factors are important for your company. The key is to make a list and then look for other prospects that match some or all of those behaviors. As prospects get closer to matching the whole list, they get a higher score.

You can then set these activities up as lead scoring criteria in Infusionsoft. You decide how many points will get assigned for each activity on the list, and how many points are needed to make someone a “one flame”,  “two flame”, and so on through a “five flame” prospect.

Once you’ve done this, your lead scoring is automated! When a prospect in your Infusionsoft database performs one of the lead scoring actions, they get points that will increase their “flame” rating. You can have your sales personnel focus on four and five flame prospects, and let others build up. If your sales team has extra time, they can reach out to lower priority prospects. But you’ll always know they are focusing their time on the prospects that are most likely to buy.

You may want to revisit your system a couple of times a year just to make sure the criteria are still the most relevant for your customers. Creating a lead scoring system one more way to maximize sales and profits!