13 Lead Scoring Criteria to Help you Target the Best Leads This Year

Your sales team spent a month chasing a ghost lead while another highly-interested prospect waited for your response. 

This is the worst-case scenario a business can face.

And to avoid this, all you need is a well-established lead scoring system. 

This blog is about lead scoring criteria – the most critical aspect of a lead scoring system. I have compiled a list of the best criteria.

Read on and choose the ones that fit your business needs. 

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is a process used to determine the potential of leads and helps the sales and marketing teams in lead prioritization. 

The process involves assigning ‘scores’ or numerical values to leads based on multiple attributes like demographics or professional information (I’ll discuss it in a few moments❗). Then, based on these scores, potential leads are prioritized and nurtured to increase the chances of conversions.

Categories of Lead Scoring Criteria

What are companies looking for when conducting lead scoring?

Lead scoring helps sales reps identify leads who are most likely to buy from you. So, setting up a scoring system or model with relevant lead scoring criteria is vital.

You can choose two lead scoring criteria categories to create a lead scoring model for your business. 

Demographic or Firmographic - Demographic lead scoring is based on demographic data like age, gender, income, location, education, and more. This is primarily valid for B2C businesses. However, in B2B business, firmographic data such as company size, location, industry, revenue, and more are used for lead scoring. 

Engagement – This lead scoring criteria category includes data on user interaction with your website. Users’ website activity and interaction with your marketing content signal their interest in the product and buying intent. For example, views on the product page, pricing page, time spent on a specific webpage, email open rates, etc.

Top 13 Lead Scoring Criteria 

While businesses choose specific lead scoring criteria based on their business needs, I have compiled a list of the best criteria you can implement to rank your leads and boost your business conversions.

1. Contact Information

How much information has your lead provided you with? You can score leads based on this lead scoring criterion.

Businesses can use the amount of contact information provided in the lead form as a signal of how interested the lead is in buying their product or service. 

For instance, in your lead form, you asked for your lead’s name, email address, and contact number and included an optional field - street address. You may want to give some brownie points to the leads who provide you with their street address despite being optional.

2. Job Type/ Title

This is one of the most common lead scoring criteria for B2B companies. Certain B2B companies target industry and organization types and consider the lead's job function and decision-making power.

If you choose this lead scoring criterion, consider the lead’s job title to understand of their budget authority and decision-making level. While it is ideal for your sales team to communicate with the final decision-maker, it is significant to identify people within the organization who can push conversations to the higher management level. 

Whether your lead is in the C-suite or you want to reach out to someone from middle management who will make the final purchase decision. Assign higher scores to leads who perfectly fit your ideal job criteria. 

3. Company size/type

Company size and type lead scoring criteria will help you identify the companies that are more likely to buy your product.

Which target audience is the ideal fit for your product or service? 

For example, are you targeting B2C companies or B2B? Or, are you looking for SMEs to sell your product or targeting enterprise organizations?

Award scores to leads who fit the organization type and size of your ideal customer profile. Also, consider negative scoring for the leads opposite to what you seek. 

4. Location

Are you selling your product only to a specific geographic location? Then this lead scoring criterion is a must for you. 

Award points to leads to fall within the specific country, city, state, zip code, or whatever it is, and negatively score the leads who fall outside your criteria. Also, consider awarding some extra points to leads who fall in the geographical location you plan to expand to. 

5. Budget

Choose leads with the budget to purchase your product or service to ensure no wasting of time and resources. You can use multiple ways to know your lead’s budget,

• Ask directly on your lead form.
• Let a salesperson ask them over a phone call or via email, or
• Take a guess considering the company’s revenue.

Once you have the budget information, prioritize the leads with the highest budgets and score them accordingly. Set a budget threshold and negatively score the leads below the threshold.

6. Industry

Among all lead scoring criteria, the industry criterion helps you to align your product or service fit to organizations that have successfully converted. Check your existing customer base and history to understand which industry leads closed successfully and the time taken to make the sale. Find out if there is a correlation between successful customers and closed-won opportunities.

7. Downloads

Here’s the most common lead scoring criterion used by most marketers. By downloads, I mean the lead magnets or lead generation content you put on your landing page to increase conversions. 

However, only downloading content isn’t all of it. Consider the value behind your offers to assign good scores to your leads. Certain lead generation downloads signal more sales readiness.

For example, you offer the following content for leads at different funnel stages.

• Awareness – Checklist, eBook, educational webinar
• Evaluation – Case study, FAQ, demo video
• Purchase – Free trial, promo code, live demo

So, give higher scores to a lead downloading a case study than the one downloading a checklist. Similarly, the highest points go to a lead who opts for a free trial. A free trial signals a lot more interest in purchase than a checklist or a case study!

8. Page visits

Lead activities on your website tell a lot about their interest in your product. 

Is a lead visiting your careers page or about us? That’s a low-score lead compared to the one who visits your pricing page. It is because a lead visiting your pricing page shows their interest in a specific solution and their likelihood to spend money on it. Hence, the former deserves a higher score. 

Similarly, a lead visiting 20 pages is more interested in your product than one visiting five pages. But, again, leads checking out the high-value pages are more likely to buy than someone clicking away one page after another.

In short, don’t consider only the number of pages visited by leads; look at the type and value of the page. It tells a lot about your lead’s interest and, thus, helps score the lead perfectly.

9. Recency and Frequency of Activities

Along with the lead’s activities on your website, you must also consider the recency and frequency of the activities. 

Recency allows you to prioritize the lead activities happening at the moment as it tells you how recently your lead has interacted with your organization. 

Additionally, frequency lets you count how often your leads have interacted with your brand. Though no activity can be considered equal, you can give extra scores to leads who repeat an action within a short duration. 

10. Email activity

Website activity. Check✅

Social media engagement. Check✅

Now comes email activity. 

How leads engage with your emails is crucial, especially those who opt for email communication only. It measures their interest level in buying your product. 

For example, if a lead opens all your lead-nurturing emails or newsletters and clicks through the links, it’s a good omen. Tell your sales team about this lead and prioritize them by awarding additional scores.

11. Lead engagement

A famous quote reads, “Not taking action is also an action.” This holds true for lead scoring.

All lead activities on your website, interaction with emails, and social media content indicate higher interest in your product or service. Likewise, a lack of activity can signal a loss of interest or that they have switched to a different seller.

Has a lead stopped interacting with your social media posts? Or spends less time on your website? Or, stopped downloading your content? Keep track. Observe for 10, 15, or 30 days depending on your sales cycle, and then assign a negative score to the leads to avoid wasting time chasing them. 

12. Off-site engagement

Your lead’s off-site engagement also matters. Not every activity indicating the sales readiness of a lead happens on your website. Your marketing software can capture lead engagement off your website with tracking cookies. Consider that for lead scoring.

For instance, leads that engage with your social media posts also deserve attention. Follow those leads and give them more attention. Award them extra points if their off-site activities indicate interest in your product or service.

13. Live event attendance

Out of all lead scoring criteria, this one is often missed out by businesses.

Did a lead attend your live event? It can signal massive interest in you. After all, they find time from their busy schedules to attend your physical or virtual conference, seminar, webinar, or promotional event. Assign different scores to leads attending different types of live events. 

For instance, score a lead attending your live conference higher than anyone attending a webinar. Then, let your sales team see the scores and reach out to these highly engaged leads faster. 

In Summary

Setting lead scoring criteria is not an arduous task. You can easily choose which criteria to follow if you know your business needs, goals, and ideal customer profiles.

Without lead scoring, you risk upsetting interested prospects. Or worse, you may miss out on prospects genuinely interested in purchasing your product.

Lead qualification gets easy with lead scoring. But it gets easier with RevenueHero. Confused?

RevenueHero is an instant lead qualification software that lets you score form fills right on your website or landing page. The platform uses lead form responses for lead qualification, speeding up the entire process – from qualifying and routing to converting. 

Sounds interesting, right?! 

Schedule a demo to learn more about RevenueHero.