Lead scoring is assigning points to prospects to identify those most likely to make a purchase.
However, less than 10 percent of companies actually practice and utilize lead scoring. This is primarily due to a misconception that lead scoring is a complex exercise, which stems from there being no hard and fast criteria on how to score leads.
The guiding principle in lead scoring is to score prospects on attributes associated with serious prospective customers. Overall, enterprises consider two broad kinds of attributes: explicit and implicit.
Explicit Attributes
Explicit attributes refer to those that the prospect reveals, or can be obtained from otherwise directly identifiable information. Examples include annual income or budget, demographic profile of the prospect, need of the product and other attributes. For instance, a real estate company may score high net worth individuals and individuals with high paying jobs more favorably.
The overall purpose of explicit information is to seek answers to questions that reveal sales-readiness.
1. Can the prospect actually afford the product?
2. Does the prospect have the authority to buy the product?
3. Why does the prospect need the product?
Implicit Attributes
Implicit attributes are information obtained by observation or through inference. A good example is online behavior. Filling up an online “contact us form” or responding to a promotional email may denote a highly interested customer.
Tracking implicit attributes answers questions such as
1. Is the prospect interested in the product or service?
2. What makes the prospect interested?
3. The extent to which the prospect is interested in the product?
It generally requires combining both explicit and implicit attributes to get a true worth of a prospect, but this again depends on the nature of the product. For instance, businesses selling high end luxury goods that require a strong push to convert, provide more weight to explicit attributes rather than implicit attributes. On the other hand, businesses selling fast moving essential products suitable for all types of people may rely extensively on implicit attributes and ignore explicit attributes.
Understanding the differences between these attributes is important to the success of lead scoring for your business. By analyzing them, you can adjust your marketing and sales process in order to lead to more conversions!
