Introduction
Lead and account scoring is a proven methodology to measure quality and level of interest. Identifying, prioritising and handing-off the next-best lead, account or opportunity for sales can be managed in a predictable manner by leveraging your lead scores as part of your processes.
Things to consider
We are often asked: what's a good score, or what's a sufficient score when to surface or hand-off leads or accounts to sales ? You're not alone, this is an important and frequent question we receive. The answer is simply: it depends.
The following considerations should be made:
We're here to help! ❤️
The SalesWings team is available to regularly review your approach to leveraging lead scores, and share best practices we see from our clients.
Lead scores are an important, but only partial criteria for lead hand-off
Lead scoring is so powerful because it is an objective measure of how interested your prospect lead, contact or account is. It is authentic, and honest, because it is reflecting your leads' and contacts' behavior. Yet, it is only part of the picture. Other critical information to determine whether a lead / account is good or bad may be available for prioritization.
For instance whether a prospect or a request is a good fit (persona, time to purchase, form data etc.), where our solution Toolbox is a great tool to leverage. Some information may even be used as a trigger to qualify a lead, account or opportunity, for instance the job title, revenue size, or simply the kind of account it is.
Certain behavior may also be used to trigger the hand-off of leads or accounts to sales, for example a specific form submission, when they visit a pricing page, sign-up for a trial, or visit a page linked to a new service/product that you're looking to push. With SalesWings, this can easily be done through reports or via Flows.
SalesWings' holistic approach (**) and methodology to prioritization is unique and provides a set of useful data points for your process: Multiple lead scoring, recency of interest, predictive (engagement) scoring, specific interest signals (via tagging & reporting). Using them in a smart way on a case-by-case basis isn't hard and goes a long way - we're happy to help!
Sales prioritisation happens all-the-time, not just at a moment.
While you may want to prioritize specific prospects and look for timing - for example inbound leads, nurtured leads, campaign specific leads - sales reps typically have a list of leads, contacts or accounts they have engaged with in the past or are actively working on. A prospect may never reach a specific threshold for some reason. Step 1 is to understand how your sales reps work (!), and most often you will find that each rep has their own lists or reports where they find their "existing" prospects. Using the various SalesWings insights (**), you can help sales people identify when target prospects are coming back to your website or show specific interests.
At SalesWings, a sales reps finds such a prioritized list of their leads and accounts on their home screen, where they land each time they log into Salesforce.
A rep's account list prioritized with SalesWings insights on the home page of Salesforce.
Lead scoring thresholds and models evolve
The right threshold may change over time, typically depending on your lead-to-sales rep ratio. Best is to get regular feedback from your sales team whether they have too many, enough, or too few leads.
For instance, if you have a low number of leads, then you may simply want to hand-off all your leads. In this situation, sales reps have to be encouraged to tackle leads starting with the ones with the highest scores.
If you have peaks, where a lot of leads and accounts are showing interest and sales reps can no longer follow-up with all prospects, you may want to increase your threshold - think of it as a valve.
Your scoring model may also evolve, for instance you may be adding new scoring criteria, or remove some. Generally, we recommend to stick to around 8 to 15 rules for scoring models, and when adding new criteria, consider removing some.
Make decisions based on data
Unless you are replicating an exact scoring model from a former lead scoring system, it may take a few weeks to have an initial understanding of what kind of score values your leads and accounts are receiving. The more time passes by, the more you will be able to use data to understand whether a certain score may be considered "good" (i.e. ready for sales).
The best way is to leverage Salesforce reporting, to understand your lead scores better. Two example reports may be found below:
General note: Our out-of-the-box Salesforce Performance Dashboard provides some sample reports to get started.
Example 1: Lead qualification rates vs. lead scores
In this report and graph, you can see at what scoring threshold your leads typically convert in Salesforce. In the report below, we see that once leads go beyond 50 points, the lead qualification rate soars (light blue). In this example, we could set the lead scoring threshold at 50.
Tips about this report:
Create a standard Salesforce lead report, and group all your leads by lead stage. If you group your lead stages, then important is that you have at least 2 categories: Qualified vs. non-qualified.
Make sure to "bucket" your lead score field. In this example report, we have bucketed them for each 10 points.
In a Salesforce dashboard, visualize your report.
To compare scores to qualification rates, you need to select the report option "stack to 100%" in your dashboard's report settings (see below).
To get an understanding how many leads you are actually handing-off when setting a certain score, you can leave the "stack to 100%" option unchecked, and you will see actual number of leads by lead score.
Report showing lead qualification rate by level of score. Also note, with a healthy lead scoring model: the higher the points, the higher the conversion rates.
Setting this option, will show you rates (%), vs. number of records (here: leads).
Example 2: Overall score distribution
Whether it is leads, contacts, accounts or opportunities (*), you may want to get an understanding how scores actually distribute across the board. This is useful to identify the right scoring threshold, or simply to understand how your model looks in action.
For this, you can create a report for any of these objects*, and then visualize it on a dashboard in a funnel view.
Report showing score distribution for all contacts.
Your lead scoring model
Some scoring models have many rules or just a few, and depending on the approach you may give many or just a few points for each scoring criteria. This means that leads may collect points from 0 to X, depending how you build your lead score.
As you may have noticed, in SalesWings every lead score has a maximum number of points, given you can define how many times points should be added for each criteria. This is purpose-built, to avoid inflated scores and too largely distributed lead scores. In general, we recommend that at least a few leads, contacts or accounts, reach maximum scores regularly - or in other words, prospects should be able to go to the maximum number of points.
The total number of points a lead/contact can collect for each score, is visible at the top right of your scoring criteria (see image below).
Tipp: Activate Easy Mode to make it easier to understand how qualified a lead is based on the score. This will display scores as % of total possible scores, so from 0 to 100. This is particularly useful when you have multiple scores, and want to compare the relative level of interest between two interests that you are measuring.
To get an understanding how your lead scoring model is being applied to your leads, contacts, accounts or opportunities, the above report Example 2 is a good report to create.
How to get started
Our success team is available post on-boarding on demand to review your lead scores, models, processes, and setup. Don't hesitate to benefit from our long experience helping customers achieve ultimate sales efficiency and smooth alignment with sales.
Don't be too scared to get things wrong; start somewhere, leverage data, get regular feedback from sales around lead/account quality and volumes, and fine-tune your approach over time.
We hope this guide was helpful! 🙂