Lead Scoring for IT Companies

It’s quite clear that not every lead will become a client, and that every lead can be scored. Lead scoring is the process of assigning points (from negative to positive range) to each lead to rank one sales lead against another with the objective to prioritize them. Such an approach is especially valuable when you don’t have a lot of sales staff but get a large number of leads. 

Why Some B2B Leads Never Convert?

1. They don’t have enough budget to get what they want by using your services. Unfortunately, B2B technology services buyers can’t know the cost of developing a custom software before sending their specific requirements to the sales team or, in other words, until becoming a lead. In turn, sales managers need to ask the engineering team for evaluating these requirements and determine the number of hours required to program this software – the pricing depends on the hours needed.
2. You don’t have the specialized expertise required by the prospect. For example, you provide SaaS software development services. Your potential customer wants to create an insurance SaaS web application, thinks you can help them and send you a request for a quote, or, in other words, become a lead. The prospect doesn’t know yet that you don’t have experience creating applications exactly for the insurance industry and that it’ll negatively affect their purchasing decision. 

Why is Lead Scoring Important?

1. A properly designed lead scoring system removes all contradictions between marketing and the sales teams. Sales departments often criticize marketers for poor quality leads that don’t convert while the marketing people, in turn, blame sales reps for low close rates. Now both teams can speak numbers, not words.
2. Lead prioritization eliminates the necessity to hire more salespeople. Hiring more sales reps may not increase the number of deals. If your leads don’t have enough budget or are out of your expertise, you won’t fix that just by getting more sales staff.
3. Lead scoring helps sales managers prioritize leads to dedicate more time to the potentially most valuable prospects and thus boost their productivity. Prioritization is about selecting the leads with a high fit according to revenue potential and buyer readiness over those with high interest. Sales reps have monthly goals to hit. Therefore, time is their top reason. Without a lead qualification process in place, sales productivity can suffer, salespeople will end up wasting lots of time on leads that have no intention of becoming customers.

How to Create a Lead Scoring System

The goal of lead scoring is to quickly identify leads that most closely fit your Ideal Customer Profile. 

The most common way to create a lead scoring system is to use historical data from past leads. Take a look at your contacts who became customers. What do they have in common?