A Guide To Scoring And Grading Your Leads
An effective marketing strategy is one of the bedrocks of every successful business. Without a good marketing strategy, a fantastic product or service will not be a commercial success. This is why every business organization strives to adopt the best and most suitable marketing strategy for its products and services. Without this strategy in place, the products and services will not roll in the profits. Thus, for a business to be successful, its marketing strategy needs to yield results.
An excellent way to improve the efficiency of a marketing strategy is by scoring and grading of leads. Not all leads generated by the sales and marketing department of a business organization will result in a successful sale. Most leads will lead the sales team to a dead end. Thus, a lot of valuable time and resources will be wasted while trying to follow up such leads.
By grading and scoring of leads generated by the sales and marketing team, a business organization will be able to weed out leads that are likely to be unsuccessful. The grading of leads entails evaluating of leads to ensure that they meet the ideal customer profile of the company. Once a lead pass the grading test, the sales team can actively go after such lead in order to close the sale. The criteria used for grading of leads include:
1. Department: Is the lead originating from the right department? If a business organization deals on information technology (IT) products and services, it doesn’t have to generate leads from the personnel department of a prospective client. The lead have to emanate from the right department: the IT department of that company.
2. Title: How influential is the person you are dealing with in that organization? Does he have the power to make the business deal happen? The prospect should be in a position to swing the deal in favor of your organization.
3. Company’s Size: What size of company do your organization target? Is it small and medium scale companies or the conglomerates? Your organization should clearly define and target the right size of company it wants to do business with.
4. Revenue: Can be the prospect affords to purchase your organization’s products and services? You have to evaluate the financial capability of the prospect. If the prospect doesn’t have the financial capacity to purchase your organization’s products and services, it is not advisable to waste time and resources pursuing the lead.
5. Location: If the location of your prospect is a priority to your organization, then location should be integral part of your organization’s lead grading system.
6. Industry: Of your products and services were designed to cater for the needs of a specific industry. Thus, your leads should be coming out of companies that are within that industry.
The lead scoring system helps to identify leads with a potential to transform into successful buying decision from the prospects. These are the leads that will be aggressively pursued by the sales and marketing team. Leads can be scored using indicators like page views, site search, downloads, ad clicks, webinars, and landing pages. While leads that does not pass the grading and scoring test should be abandoned, the follow-up button should be pressed for those that meet the grading and scoring criteria of your organization marketing strategy.
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