Marketing / Automation

How to use lead scoring effectively

Clay Harper

Updated: Dec 11, 2023 · 5 min read

Toolkit for download in this article

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It’s 4:45 p.m. and the end of a long day. You’d be perfectly justified in heading home, but you are no quitter. You jump into your customer database and do a quick search for prospects in the hopes of getting one more sale. 

So who do you call first? You’re looking for a quick win here. Who on this list is most likely to purchase when you call? It would be nice to simply look at a list of people and know which ones are more likely to close.

Or what if, instead of you making the call, it’s your best salesperson? Their time is a large expense to your business. They can only call so many prospects with their valuable time. Who should they call first? You want them to call the leads most likely to buy. Knowing who is most likely to purchase is the promise of lead scoring.

Today, I’ll walk you through a starter lead scoring strategy that any business can use.

What is lead scoring?Lead scoring is really just segmentation, or separating and organizing contacts into groups that make sense for your business.

Infusionsoft by Keap lead scoring helps you see who your most prepared leads are by aggregating the positive actions they take toward buying, and representing all those actions with flame icons next to their name.  You can then order your list having those with the highest flame score on top. Call those leads for your best bet to convert some quick sales.

Create a sequence of email messages that get sent based on timed triggers or client actions, like booking an appointment or downloading an ebook through Keap.

So, lead scoring is great and we want to use it. But how?

In my years of experience at Infusionsoft by Keap, I have had many users I work with have trouble setting up and using lead scoring. It is crucial to understand that your lead scoring will only be as effective as your understanding of your sales process (or marketing plan). This is because lead score relies on the ability of Infusionsoft by Keap to know what good things the lead has done.

To get the most out of lead scoring, you should have a rough path that people take on their way to a purchase decision for your product. When you understand those steps people take toward purchasing, the next step is to tag people as they take those steps, then make those tags influence the lead score.

EXAMPLE SALES PROCESS

Your buyers tend to go through a path before purchasing. It may not always happen in order or on a particular timeline, but it may escalate like the example below:

  1. The lead requests a free report on your website and becomes a contact
  2. Later, the contact registers and attends a webinar
  3. A week down the road, that contact takes an online assessment
  4. In time, the contact requests a quote or requests contact
  5. Contact purchases

Again, not everyone will follow this track exactly, but people tend to start with the earlier, easier activities before they move on to the harder, pricier, higher-pressure actions.

Now imagine that every time the lead takes one of these actions, you are labeling them so you know that they did it. The more actions, the higher the score.

But be careful—with any list of actions, some actions will be more valuable than others. Infusionsoft by Keap, or any good lead scoring template, should allow you to weigh some actions more than others so that someone who requests a quote has a higher lead score than someone who has just attended a webinar.

Using lead scoring for your business

But you say you don’t know what your sales process is, or you don’t have a sophisticated sales process.

That’s OK; we have you covered.

Anyone can follow the steps below to start using email lead scoring. The following strategy will allow you to lead score contacts based on how long it has been since they last clicked any link in your email marketing to them. As long as you are sending emails out to your people, this should be useful.

First some set up:

  1. Download the Track Email Engagement Campaign to help track link clicks
  2.  For this to work you will need to start tagging the links in all your emails so you know when people click (old emails too)

This “Track Email Engagement Campaign” makes it possible, so long as you are placing the same tag on every link in every email, to start a timer on every click of a link, and over time, you can tell how long it’s been since any given contact clicked on any of your links in any campaign.

Think of it: This campaign allows you to know how long it’s been since a certain contact clicked on a link any of your email communication. This is a very powerful campaign.

Lead scoring in Infusionsoft by Keap helps you tell which leads are most likely to buy but it is only as good as your understanding of your marketing process. Use the above suggestions as a starting point and work your way to success.

Clay Harper has been helping small businesses succeed with Infusionsoft by Keap for four years. Before that, he was a sales and technology trainer sent to fun and exciting places. Clay started out helping new Infusionsoft by Keap users, but now works exclusively with businesses that struggle to make Infusionsoft by Keap work for their business. In his spare time, he uses Infusionsoft by Keap for his honey business and is a very accomplished beekeeper.

 

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