How do you decide whether to move a customer opportunity into your sales pipeline? Hopefully you are not automatically adding any contact. To score a lead you need a method you can apply consistently to help you and you team decide when a contact should be added to the pipeline and how it should be treated.

However, incomplete data and insufficient insights continue to thwart marketers ability to score leads, according to a study from Decision Tree Labs. Yet creating a score has proven to help accelerate the number of qualified opportunities accepted by the Sales organization.

The ability to properly score leads is an essential component to improving conversion and win rates, two key pipeline measures. A lead score should provide insight into the opportunity’s buying interest, level of engagement, and purchase intent. Scoring methodologies help improve Marketing and Sales alignment and serve as triggers and help determine when to forward the opportunity to the Sales team. A properly scored lead helps clarify both the transfer of the opportunity and next actions for that opportunity.

8 Factors to Create Your Score

The success of your lead scoring methodology rests upon the criteria you select, how these are rated, and the gates you establish. It’s important to get these right so leverage experts if this is new to you.

It helps if the Marketing and Sales organizations work together to gain a consensus on the following 8 factors:

Degree of fit between your offer and the customer’s problem
Level of engagement by the decision-maker
Purchase time frame
Implementation time
Budget status
Opportunity size and scope for you
Opportunity size and scope for the customer
Anything else that is unique to your business

Focus on behavior and fit criteria. Sales and Marketing should then work together to assign a weight to each factor between 1 and 10. Establish agreed upon observable behaviors or gates in advance that will be used to assign a rating for each opportunity against each factor.

Use These 8 Factors to Start Your Lead Scoring Process

Start you lead scoring process with 8 Factors

Finally, Sales and Marketing should agree on the threshold score for forwarding leads to the Sales team. This is a solid starting point for your lead scoring process. There’s more to do improve your opportunity management. Learn more about developing your process to score opportunities.