Not everyone who enters your sales pipeline is ready to buy, so pursuing all leads is a hit-or-miss endeavor that often results in wasted sales resources. Though all leads require nurturing of various degrees, when it comes to shifting gears from simply marketing to leads to actively selling to them, you should strike only when the iron is hot. That being said, the opportune moment to seize a sales opportunity varies from business to business. You may want to follow up with a lead after they download a free ebook, after they visit your pricing page, or maybe after they click a link in your email. But realistically, it takes a variety of touchpoints and engagement indicators with your brand to truly deem a lead “hot.” What you need is a consistent framework to bridge the gap between sales and marketing thereby allowing you to channel qualified leads from your marketing funnel to designated sales reps in real time. This is the essence of lead scoring and routing.
Lead scoring by definition is a systematic way to rank leads based on their profile, engagement with your business or both, by assigning a point value indicating which leads are worth investing sales resources on and which leads need further nurturing.
Knowing who your hottest and most engaged prospects are ensures that your sales team isn’t wasting time cold calling or following up with dead-end leads. Once you’ve established the criteria for what makes a good lead and decided on a process for pursuing each one, you can begin routing those leads to your salespeople or feeding them into targeted follow-up funnels automatically.
Ranking your leads by point value automatically gives you the opportunity to quickly seize the best sales opportunities. Not only does this boost the efficiency or your sales cycle, it shortens it substantially by allowing you to focus your sales efforts on only qualified leads.
Feeding qualified leads into a lead router spares your sales reps from having to handpick leads that may not be ready to buy. Instead, it hand-delivers to them a manageable quantity of leads that can be routed to a designated rep by time zone or various other criteria. Allocating your sales resources to the right leads in such a way results in focused sales conversations with greater purchase inclination.
Automated lead scoring and routing in Ontraport can be set up in a matter of minutes. Ontraport makes it easy for your business to define specific lead qualification criteria and quickly get only the hottest leads into the hands of your sales reps. As leads interact with your business, their engagement prompts an automatic increase in their lead score, bringing them closer to one or more predetermined thresholds — upon which you can trigger a number of actions such as adding them to a lead router or lead nurturing funnel, sending them a product discount, etc. As a result, you’ll be left with a more defined and efficient sales process free of uncertainty for your reps.
Lead scoring and routing continue to be dreadfully underutilized in the entrepreneurial arena. The boosted efficiency of your sales workflow is night and day.
- Martin Cogburn, Campaign Manager
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