Taking the first step towards anything is always the hardest part. Eating healthier, exercising regularly, or being more organised. In principle, I’m sure you would all know the best way to achieve what you’re aiming for. In reality, putting that first step into practice always seems to elude our efforts.

Psychology has given us the reasoning behind this struggle in the form of the Stages of Change Model. It states there are 5 stages in maintaining any change: precontemplation (no recognition of the change needed), contemplation (actively thinking about changing a behaviour), determination (preparing for the change), action (implementing the change), and maintenance (continuing the behaviour).

Clearly, you’re already at the contemplation stage. I mean, you’re reading this blog to find out how to change your lead scoring strategy. So, let us give you a helping hand to move onto the determination stage. We’re willing to give you an insight into our Lead Scoring template to get you started in your preparations.

Define

First things first, define who you’re targeting. Using your Killer Values decide on several factors which will make a company the perfect fit for you. We started with role, company size and industry to give our Company Persona:

“Marketing and Sales teams in B2B businesses with an annual turnover of £5 million or more. Actively looking to generate new business opportunities for their sales team.”

Create

Then it’s time to create your Journey. We promote different types of content dependent on the leads tier. What we mean by this is how engaged are they with the company:

  • Discovery: This is the first stage your customers will interact with. Give them more information to work with. A ‘How To’ rather than ‘Buy Now’. This can include Whitepapers, Guides, Best Practice documents and Blogs. We usually score these pages pretty low, 5 points.
  • Consider: This is the point where your prospects consider your business as a potential fit for theirs. Show them how fantastic you are. But don’t just say it, give specific examples to back up your claims. Feature pages, Solutions and Case Studies tend to score 10-15 points.
  • Decide: This is the make or break period. Your prospect is interested, give them that extra nudge towards a confirmation call. Offers, Pricing and Demonstrations score highly, around 22 points.

If you’re more of a visual person you can find our Lead Scoring infographic here. This is a structure we’ve found works for us, but play around with it, adapt it to your company. You also need to decide what your lead bands are. Perhaps 50 points qualify as a ‘Hot Lead’, but when they’re below 10 points they’re still a ‘Cold Lead’. It’s down to you to fill the gap.

Justify

You may be wondering why we use this structure. Put simply, it helps us provide prospects with the right content at the right time. Those leads who need a little bit of extra love are nurtured until they’re ready to buy, and those who are already Hot Leads are identified early to give our sales team the best chance of turning them into a sale.

Here at CommuniGator, the relationship between Marketing and Sales is pretty good, and part of the reason lies in the leads passed onto Sales. Through Lead Scoring, only marketing qualified leads are passed over, so sales get the best leads of the bunch. This means no more cold calling, saving a substantial amount of time.

So now you’ve got the resource, all that’s needed is to put this plan into Action. Keep up regular Maintenance to ensure you continue to get the most from your lead scoring.