No matter how big or small your company is you are likely to have more customer data than you can manually sift through to determine a customer or prospect current position in the buying / product lifestyle. This is where a Lead scoring model can be really useful. It allows you to objectively rank and compare your customers and prospects according to their current buying cycle status.

About the author: Matthew Johnson is marketing expert and contributes his knowledge about lead scoring and lead management to the success of Strateco and its clients.

So while a scoring model allows a company to rank their customers and prospects, one of the big advantages behind a scoring model is the opportunity it affords a company to actually get to know their customers. So many companies go out into the market place and just sell to whomever they can possibly get in front of, in a similar fashion to the good old spray and pray email practice.

After sitting down with a number of companies in a workshop and asking them to describe their typical customer, most did not know where to start and with others there was a major discrepancy between what marketing and sales had to say. This is the perfect starting point and a great opportunity to analyse the data one has and get to know your customer. Once you know your customer it’s time to create a lead scoring model and monitor the subtle changes.

Getting to know your customers is a pretty good reason for setting up a scoring model, but if certain other things in you company are not in place it’s probably not worthwhile.

1. Does marketing supply sales with enough leads? If your business is not generating enough leads then there is no need for creating a scoring model. You probably have a bigger problem to solve.
2. Do Sales follow up on the leads? If so, how quickly are they passed from marketing to sales, and what are the follow-up timeframes? Are there processes and performance agreements in place?
3. Lead Quality – is there a quality vs quantity problem.
4. Marketing Content – does your company have quality content to put out there in exchange for a valuable prospect data?
5. Where are you collecting information? Is all your information being collected running into a single data pool? If you are collecting data from various tools and not collating it, then it’s probably not worthwhile creating a scoring model.

If you have enough leads, good content and a single tool where you can capture and evaluate data, scoring is definitely something to consider. Not only will you benefit from an objective view of your customer and prospect buying cycle status but also bring your sales and marketing team’s goals into alignment.

Stay updated and read the second part of Lead Scoring Praxistipps next Friday.