Score Leads Like a Pro

Score Your Leads with Insightly “Lead Rating”

In fact, depending on your business model, marketing strategy, and product mix, some leads may be nothing more than a waste of time. For example, if your product is only available in the United States, an inquiry from Portugal is probably not at the top of your priority list.

For this reason, Insightly offers a simple, yet effective way to score your leads. Although easy to overlook, the “lead rating” field can be an invaluable tool for keeping your team working on those leads most likely to convert.

To begin scoring your leads in Insightly, simply open an individual lead record and toggle the lead rating to your desired level (by default, Insightly’s range goes from 0 to 5).

Once lead scores are assigned to your existing leads, you can then use Insightly filters and reports to prioritize next steps.

To build a lead score filter, simply click “create new filter” and select “lead rating” in the “filter by” dropdown menu. Customize your settings and save accordingly. The following screenshot shows leads that have a rating greater than three.

For a more dynamic, in-depth view, try setting up a custom lead score report. Navigate to your Insightly reports, create a new lead report, and drag “lead rating” into the reporting window. Now you can view and sort leads based on perceived quality.

Closely Monitor Lead Quality by Source

As you experiment with lead scoring, it may become painfully obvious that certain sources are generating lower quality leads than others.

For example, let’s say that most leads originate from one of five sources:

• Trade shows
• Organic web search
• Paid online ads
• Cold calling
• Social media

Your gut tells you that trade show leads are the least valuable to your business. Unfortunately, your sales cycle takes forever, which means your current batch of leads could take months to close. And, you need to finalize your event budget by next Friday. What are you to do?

By tracking lead rating, you’re able to get much quicker feedback on how effectively your marketing dollars are being spent. Simply drill down into a detailed report that includes both lead rating and source. You might try filtering all open leads by each source and arriving at an average score. Assuming that your lead scores are reliable, this exercise should offer a glimpse into future marketing ROI.

Armed with this information, you’re now ready to finalize that event budget – a feat otherwise impossible without your foresight to track and monitor lead quality!

Avoid Weird Styling Issues When Pasting

Copying and pasting text can be frustrating – especially when pasted items mess up the styling of a time-sensitive project. Oversized fonts, missing characters, and weird spacing issues are just a few common byproducts of your “Control + V” impulse.

An occasional quirky email or internal document is something you can live with. However, when you’re preparing a customer-facing blog post or newsletter, making a single mistake can tarnish your otherwise stellar reputation.

To avoid embarrassment, it’s a good habit to paste plain text (instead of “formatted text”). Depending on the computer, browser, and apps that you’re using, pasting unformatted text can be done a number of ways, such as:

• Edit > Paste and match style
• Right click > Paste without formatting
• Right click > Keep text only

Let’s say that you’re drafting a blog post, which has two styled sections: paragraph text and a header. Your current header reads “Why You Should Love My Company” (original, right?). After giving the headline additional thought, you decide to change it to “How My Company Will Improve Your Life” (another brilliant title that you copy from your “idea bucket” document).

As you know all too well, selecting the new title and pasting on top of the current headline will get you in trouble. So, instead, you could do this:

1. Place your cursor after the word “Why”
2. Right click and select “Paste without formatting”
3. Backspace to delete extra text from the original headline

Congrats! You just copied and pasted without messing up the style!

Define Your In-House Lead Scoring Criteria

New deals don’t just fall from the sky. Like anything else in business, the outcomes we achieve are usually directly related to prior effort.

With this in mind, the first quarter is drawing to a close. Is it living up to everything you had hoped for? Will you beat your quota? If not, what caused the discrepancy?

Perhaps you’re not being strategic enough with your appointment setting goals. All things being equal, more sales appointments result in more quotes and proposals – which, of course, translate into new customers.

So, what are some simple ways to boost the number of appointments next quarter? Try these:

Don’t Just Wait for Inbound Leads – Inbound marketing can be a great source of new leads, but it’s not everything. Never stop cold calling and searching for new sources of your own leads. Be your own lead source to supplement what comes in from your website.

Circle Back to Closed-Lost Deals – Unless you’re selling a piece of equipment that lasts indefinitely, there’s always a possibility that lost opportunities could reignite. It’s therefore healthy and wise to occasionally circle back with those who originally said “no.”

Partner with Your Marketing Team – Your marketing team is always looking for new ways to engage prospects and customers. Don’t be shy about sharing upsell, cross-sell, and brand awareness ideas with marketing. Email, social, and PPC ads are great ways to stir up interest – and, of course, generate more appointments for you.