Product Review: Lead Scoring by Force.com Labs

You spend lots of time and resources developing leads for your sales team. Are you making the most of those efforts by making sure that sales is getting the hottest leads vs. those that still need to be nurtured and developed? Implementing a lead scoring model for your leads will enable you to prioritize them based on who they are and what they have done.

Force.com labs have recently made available a free application to allow you to apply value to your leads and separate the hot from the cold.  With a simple download from the Appexchange, you can now create hundreds of behavior and demographic rules in seconds using point and click tools. 

Lead scoring makes sales more efficient by prioritizing those most likely to generate revenue by:
• Creating rules to score leads based on attributes or who they are.
• Creating rules to score leads based on interactions or what they have done.

Applying value to leads with lead scoring

If you know the Director of Marketing is the right person to sell to, you can apply a value to that title (10) that is higher than others such as Manager (3) or even CEO (7).  The Lead Scoring application allows you to create up to 200 custom active lead rules specific to who the lead is.

Let’s say that through analysis you have identified prospects who have attended an event sponsored by your company to be more likely to convert to closed revenue, you can create a custom field “Attended” and tie a score to that field.  The lead scoring application will allow you to configure up to 450 active rules relating to the interactions that a lead has conducted.

Finally, if you know that prospects who opt out of receiving communications such as email and promotions are less likely to purchase, you can indicate a lower value (-1).

Categorizing scored leads

Once scored, you can categorize the leads into buckets or priority levels such as A, B and C. Working together, Sales and Marketing should meet regularly to fine-tune the criteria for these categories. If the threshold for an A lead is 50, you might lower to a 40 during a time of year when the flow of leads to your sales team is low.

Recommendation

I have found this application to be very useful for companies just starting to create lead scoring models. The price is right and with the ability to configure hundreds of rules specific to your individual company and sales organization, this application proves to be a great value.

If you have the need to tie value to a web experience and/or if your business requires extreme time sensitivity, this application does not support those activities. I would recommend talking to a partner that specializes in marketing automation to assist you in developing a solution that meets your needs. You can find partners on the Appexchange.

This application is one step in developing a successful lead scoring program. The key to your success is conducting research and analysis to determine the attributes and interactions critical to identify a lead that historically generates revenue.