Best Practice: Lead Scoring for Manufacturers

Not all leads are created equal. Some wonderful few may practically scream “take my money!” at you. Others may require endless amounts of calls, emails, and other follow-up only to end up going somewhere else. Being able to tell the difference between a high quality lead and one that’s simply there to waste your time is an essential part of marketing.

Once you know the value of your leads, you can know how much time and effort to spend marketing to them. It makes sense to spend the majority of your effort on the best leads, but before you can know who your best leads are, you need some way to measure their value. What is lead scoring, and what are some lead scoring best practices for manufacturers?

What is Lead Scoring?

Hubspot defines lead scoring as: “a methodology used to rank prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value each lead represents to the organization. Job position, number of social media followers, or company size may be information valuable to your business about a lead.”

When you know what kind of leads you’re looking for, you know who to focus your efforts on. Lead scoring is a valuable tool that gives you better insight into who your leads are. But how do you do it right? Where do you start?

Lead Scoring Best Practices for Manufacturers

The most important piece of a lead scoring system is data. What traits do your best leads share? Are there any commonalities among your poorest leads? These traits can be part of the scoring system. If you know that people with a certain title tend to be strong prospects for you, but those with another title are poor prospects, then ‘job title’ will be an important piece of data for you to collect.

But you need more than a single data point. What are other characteristics of your buyers? Do they tend to be more receptive at different times of the year? Or are there particularly bad times? If so, that’s also measureable data. Someone who may be one of your best prospects 80% of the time may not be worth the effort during the other 20%.

However you go about it, you’re looking to develop a system by which you can measure the quality of your leads to help you spend your time and money more efficiently. To do it right, you’re going to need help from other departments – particularly sales. (If you can’t get sales to help you, then lead scoring is a waste of time. Instead focus on developing a Service Level Agreement)

Assuming you have the sales team on board, take the time to have a sit down conversation with them. Ask them: What are the demographics and behaviors their best leads share? Those are the traits to score highly.

Be sure to keep the lines of communication open with the sales team. Your system is probably going to need some adjustment along the way. That’s fine. A mostly accurate system is better than having no system at all.

Need help developing a lead scoring system? We can help.