There’s a pile of sales leads from your last trade show or marketing event sitting on your desk. Your sales manager continues to ask you for a progress report and you try to avoid telling him you haven’t done anything with the leads. Any of this sound familiar?
This can be a relatively simple process with just a little bit of effort. Like almost everything else in life, all you have to do to make it successful is to use it. The objective in scoring and ranking sales leads is for you focus your time and energy where you are likely to have the most success. There’s a novel concept!
This is not unlike ranking customers. We all have A, B and C customers. You developed some scoring method to rank your customers. Do the same for sales leads. As you know, spending time with A and B customers/prospects usually generates more sales.
A scoring model can be developed quickly and easily. For example, depending on whether you are territory based or account based here are some scoring factors that you can apply to those sales leads:
- Are they in your territory?
- Company size. Check their website. You can make an educated guess on size.
- Have you done work in their primary industry?
- Have you dealt with them in the past?
- Title of contact on lead. Is the title consistent with the level you want?
- Have you done work with similar companies?
Weight these factors, or others significant to you, by importance. The result is a ranking of that pesky stack of sales leads cluttering your desk. Now you can begin a systematic approach to lead follow up. High ranking get a phone call, lower ranking get an email.
Not only should your conversion rate increase, you will also learn more about your lead sources enabling you to improve those too.
Remember to continually test your model to keep up with changes in your sales strategy.
A well-developed and tested method of scoring leads will determine how they get followed up. In turn, your sales should increase.
