Lead scoring
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is a way of ranking enquiries by how likely they are to become a sale, with points for how closely each one matches your good customers and for the interest it has shown. Industry, company size and region earn fit points; a look at the pricing page, a case study read or a phone call earns interest points. Above an agreed threshold, a lead goes straight to sales.
Example
An industrial doors company gets about 80 enquiries a month, and its salesperson has time for 25 proper conversations. It scores them on seven rules:
- company in construction or logistics: +15;
- 10 or more employees: +10;
- site within the delivery area: +5;
- opened the pricing page: +10;
- read a case study: +10 each, up to two;
- phoned or asked for a site survey: +25;
- 60 days with no activity at all: −10.
Two enquiries arrive one morning. The first is from a logistics firm with 40 staff (+15, +10) and a site in the area (+5); the person opened the pricing page (+10) and read two case studies (+20), for 60 points. The second is from a private individual who only looked at the pricing page: 10 points. The threshold is 50, so the first goes to sales that day and the second joins a lead nurturing sequence until the interest grows. That way the 25 conversations a month go to the highest-scoring enquiries, not to the first 25 that arrived.
Why it matters for a business
When there are more enquiries than sales time, they get handled in the order they arrived or by gut feel, and the hot one waits behind the merely curious. Scoring sorts the queue. It also tells you something about the marketing: a campaign that brings plenty of low-scoring enquiries is bringing volume, not customers.
The points are not a verdict. The rules are written with the salespeople and checked against closed deals every few months; if 20-point enquiries close as often as 60-point ones, the rules are wrong.
What to ask
- Which signals earn points, and where do the weights come from — your own deals or a template?
- Does each rule have a cap? Without one, a visitor who clicks through a dozen pages outscores someone who phoned.
- Can the salesperson see why an enquiry scored what it did, or only the number?
- How is the scoring described in your privacy notice? Automated scoring of people who left a name and an email is profiling under GDPR.
Scoring rules inside a CRM or a site admin are part of the web software we build. On this site, each anonymous visit is scored on behaviour alone — a case study read, the contact page opened, a form half filled in — once the visitor has agreed to analytics, and the score is frozen onto the enquiry when it is sent. Every score keeps its arithmetic line by line, and the weights can be changed in the admin without a new release.