Maximizing Your Sales Leads

Perhaps you already have a basic sales lead management program in place. But to take lead management to the next level, you need to go beyond the foundation when you determined your ideal target and which activities you'll use for qualification with a scoring matrix. Consider six components to develop a robust lead-scoring matrix.

1. Individual Lead Score: This is the sum of the various scores combined for each prospect. The higher the number, the hotter the lead. Scoring tallies should reflect demographics and behavior such as:

• Clicking on email links
• Completing web forms
• Visiting your website's product pages
• Reading your blog or other company social media

2. Company Score: A good indicator of interest is the number of prospects at a company that have indicated interest in your product(s). When you have multiple leads from one company, you can bump all those leads' scores or you can establish a company score from the total of all the leads. Tracking buyer roles within the company will affect scores too. For example, you may want to rate "influencers" differently than "decision-makers".

3. Product Score: To get a more granular view of your leads' interest, assign a specific score to each product line. This can help you better understand buyer behavior and manage campaigns more effectively for separate products. Some situations may call for multiple scoring when leads show interest in more than one of your products.

Next blog: 4-6 components to complete a lead-scoring matrix.