Lead scoring is a must-have tool for today’s B2B marketer. It helps marketers to generate leads that are better qualified, lends direction to their marketing efforts enabling them to focus on the more important ones and also fuels better revenue generation by providing insights for lead nurturing programs. While the idea of lead scoring sounds pretty alluring, a surprising number of businesses fail to engage in it, purely due to lack of knowledge. This whitepaper spells out the benefits of lead scoring and tells you how to create a basic lead scoring model that you can use.

1. WHY LEAD SCORING IS GOOD
FOR YOU AND HOW TO GO
ABOUT IT

2. Executive Summary
Lead scoring is a must-have tool for today’s B2B marketer. It helps marketers to generate leads
that are better qualified, lends direction to their marketing efforts enabling them to focus on the
more important ones and also fuels better revenue generation by providing insights for lead
nurturing programs. While the idea of lead scoring sounds pretty alluring, a surprising number of
businesses fail to engage in it, purely due to lack of knowledge. This whitepaper spells out the
benefits of lead scoring and tells you how to create a basic lead scoring model that you can use.
What is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring is the process of assigning points to prospects that indicate the prospect’s interest
level in the business offering. Points or scores are assigned to the prospect based on their
attributes and behavior towards the company’s marketing efforts. For example, a prospect who is
the part of the decision making team in the buyer company and has been a regular visitor of the
seller’s website will score more and rank higher than a prospect who is in the executive level or
has shown minimal interest in the seller’s website or e-mails.
Top 3 Benefits of Lead Scoring
Get Qualified Leads
Is your sales team complaining of poor quality leads? Are your salespersons citing lead
quality as a reason for not being able to close deals? You can put an end to this sales-
marketing banter with lead scoring. Lead scoring lends a logical and scientific angle to
the process of categorizing leads ensuring that the leads passed on to your sales team
are of good quality. There’s no room for subjectivity as you classify leads based on the
points earned by them, owing to their behavior and attributes.
Prepare Personalized Marketing Programs
Depending on the score of your prospects, you can categorize them into various
marketing programs. Some with high scores could be passed on to sales immediately,
while some could be put on suitable lead nurturing programs. Lead scoring allows you
to design personalized marketing programs for each bucket of prospects depending on
their interest levels, thus enhancing your chances of closing deals.

3. Know Whom to Splurge On
Do you spend a lot of time, effort and money on prospects who just don’t respond?
Lead scoring will help you determine which prospects are worth the investment, and
allow you to prioritize your marketing expenditure accordingly. Invest more time in
prospects with a higher score and let your automated lead nurturing programs handle
the others.
Creating a Lead Scoring Model that Works
Know What Counts
The first step is to determine the aspects based on which lead scores would be assigned.
Examples include prospect attributes such as age, location, title, decision making authority or
prospect behavior such as response towards your e-mail marketing campaign, website visits or
digital footprint. When assessing prospect behavior, make sure you take into account all the
touch-points that have been a source of prospect interaction.
Assign Weight
Once you have identified the aspects, the next step is to assign weight to each of them. Not all
prospect attributes or behavior are equal. For example, consider an e-mail sent by your company
that is opened by 2 prospects—one being the CEO and the other being the purchase manager.
Obviously, the CEO should score higher simply by the virtue of his position in the organizational
hierarchy that will help you close the deal faster.
Determine Threshold Limits
When creating your lead scoring model, be sure to spell out the threshold limits per
activity/attribute. Threshold limits help the score stay realistic and prevent unwarranted lead
score inflation. For example, suppose a prospect opens your marketing e-mail 5 times, would it
make sense to score them 5 times? If not, you can set a threshold limit to the number of times
you want the score to be applied.
While creating a basic lead scoring model is easy, its accuracy depends on the co-ordination
between sales and marketing. For the leads scoring model to work, marketing and sales will need
real-time updates from each other about prospect behavior. Marketing automation programs may

4. be used to bridge the gap between the marketing and sales functions, thus strengthening your
company’s lead scoring model.

5. For the past 14 years, MindMatrix has been aligning sales and marketing
functions for over 20,000 sales and marketing profes sionals across 200
companies, from diverse verticals through its innovative sales and
marketing software and solutions.
Unique to the industry, MindMatrix offers Next Generation Marketing
Automation software on a single unified platform for Sales and Mar keting.
Our solutions bring about a seamless integration of the 2 functions helping
our clients derive the maximum benefit from their investment in marketing
and sales automation.
Contact me today to know more about how MindMatrix solutions can help
you align your marketing and sales processes for improved results.