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. By using lead scoring, you can easily identify hot and cold leads without any tedious sorting, allowing you to deliver only the hottest, most qualified prospects to your sales team. The process of feeding those leads to designated members of your sales team is called lead routing.