When you have quite a few leads for your business, you know things are going well.  But not every lead will likely transfer over into a sale.  You will need to separate the quality leads from those that will never turn into anything so that you can put your best sales people onto the leads that might actually become sales.  That is where lead scoring comes into play.  When you score your leads, you can attach values to your leads based on the information you have on them so that you can decide which leads are more likely to go some place.

The scores you give your leads will help you determine when that prospect is ready to talk to a sales person.  The quality leads will spend more time with your content and they will be better informed and more interested overall when they hear from your sales staff.  The scores you give the leads, however, takes quite a bit of thought to set up initially.  Once you have it in place, it should mostly operate itself.

First, decide if your business really needs to use lead scoring in order to turn leads into sales.  If you have too many leads to follow them all, lead scoring is a great way to narrow things down.  You will also need to ask yourself if you have enough information to score the leads that you do get.  If you do, then you can go ahead with your lead scoring plans.

Second, you will want to identify the criteria that your leads need to meet in order to be qualified leads.  This is very important because if you implement this step incorrectly, you could end up chasing all the wrong leads.  Sit down with those involved with your company and think about the behaviors and demographics that make a prospective buyer a qualified lead.  Also talk about the type of interest that person needs to show in order for you to pass them over to the sales team.

Next, you will assign point values to those criteria so that you can score each lead in the same manner.  Weight the points in relation to how important they are to you and your company.  Use a scale of 0-100 or less in order to help you decide which leads are sales ready and which are just nosing around out of curiosity.

Then, you need to decide what level of a score makes a lead ready for a sale.  You do not want to hassle leads with sales contacts until they are ready to buy, so choose your score carefully.  You also want to maximize the effect of your sales team so they can contact only the leads that are ready for the purchase.

Once you have a lead scoring system in place, you should not have to do much but sit back and watch it work.  However, getting it situated will take some time, effort, and thought.