Direct Your Reps to the Best Leads
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe how lead scoring works in Salesforce.
- Set up lead scoring for your organization.
Spend Rep Time Wisely—on the Best Leads
Imagine this: You’re a sales rep, and each morning you make a list of local companies you think can make great leads. You drive to each one to make the sale. When you arrive, sometimes you find the company has gone out of business, or maybe worse, that your “prospect” is already a customer. That’s an awkward conversation!
Listing out the leads you want to pursue each day is an evergreen practice. But the reason it didn't go well in the scenario is that the list was based on, well, nothing. To find the best leads to pursue, you have to base your decision on solid data, like a lead score.
Salesforce can score your incoming leads based on factors that you choose. You might choose demographics (company size or industry) or actions the person has taken (visited your website, downloaded an ebook, or filled out a form). Decide what factors you want to use to score leads based on what you know about what leads close. If that type closed in the past, they’ll probably close in the future, so you’ll know what your reps should focus on.
Your Salesforce org is a wealth of information about which of your deals you win, which you don’t, and the factors that influence each. Use this to help choose which factors you'll score your leads on. If you want to get advanced (and we encourage you to), also apply different weights based on which factors have the most influence on close rates.
Set Up Lead Scoring in Salesforce
Once you’ve identified the factors you’re going to score, you can set up Salesforce to keep track of them, both by the category and the final total. Let’s say you’re tracking Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing, and we’re going to track this table, in Salesforce.
| Factor | Score |
|---|---|
| Budget |
3 |
| Authority |
2 |
| Need |
3 |
| Timing |
2 |
|
Total Score
|
10
|
Note: You might find other factors are better indicators of what can close than these listed here. This is just a classic BANT model, and we use it as an example to demonstrate.
Just follow these four steps to set this up in Salesforce:
- Create a picklist field for each factor: Create a picklist field for each factor you’re going to score, for example Budget, Need, Authority, and Timing. Assign each picklist values specific to the factor. For example, for the Budget options, you can have picklist options like “Buyer has budget” or “Buyer doesn’t have budget.”
- Create a field to track the score for each factor: Create a numeric formula field to display the score for each factor (Budget Score, Need Score, Authority Score, Timing Score). You can choose which picklist option translates to which score. For example, you can set it up so that in Budget, if the rep chooses “Buyer has budget,” the score field is set to 3. If they choose “Buyer doesn’t have budget,” the score is set to 0.
- Create a formula field for the total score: Create another formula field to calculate the lead’s total score (simply add the various factor scores).
- Give it an image: Then—and this is where it gets really cool—you can use a text field to display an image that shows how high of a priority the lead is, for example with a 5-star rating scale. In our example, a score of 8–9 is marked by five stars. That will get eager reps’ attention.
Now you’re ready to point your reps to the very best leads, so they can use their time on what’s going to close.
