Lead generation is the process a company goes through to create a pool or database of leads. A lead is any person who indicates interest in a company’s specific product or service. It is important to note that a lead is not a customer. Rather, a lead is a potential customer. A lead may not represent a personal interest in the product or service but may stand in for an institution or potential corporate customer.
A pool or database of leads is significant because this will serve as the starting point of sales activities and eventual revenue generation. Before this pool of leads can become customers, they should be subjected to a useful process called lead scoring. Lead scoring helps companies identify high-quality leads that they can focus their sales efforts on.
The first step in the lead generation process is when a potential lead discovers the product or service through a marketing channel. This marketing channel can be a website or social media account. It may be through a conference, fair, seminar, or a traditional paper ad or billboard.
Based on this discovery, the potential lead does something like click a button or call a number. This is done in response to a call-to-action element in the ad or marketing campaign. At this point, the potential lead has become an actual lead since they have evinced interest in the product or service by responding to the call to action.
The call-to-action activity typically has an online or physical form that allows customers to enter their personal data, including their contact information. The aggregate of these customer-provided records will then comprise the lead pool or database.
For a small amount of lead, records lead scoring is no longer necessary since the sales team will include the entire pool of leads in their sales activities. On the other hand, the sheer size of the lead database might be such that it is not practical from both a cost and an effort perspective to include the whole database in the costly sales efforts. In cases like this, lead scoring is done to define the subset of the lead database that are high-quality leads that are qualified for further attention by the sales team.
The starting point of lead scoring is to create a buyer persona. The buyer persona is composed of the qualities of an ideal customer. This process will be more effective if it involves the sales team since they have a good sense of what characteristics make it more likely for customers to buy a product or service.
Once these characteristics have been defined, they should be ranked according to importance, and points should be assigned to each characteristic. The higher the points, the more important the character is in the lead, eventually buying a product or service. Taking into account the point system, a point threshold must be defined. The point threshold is the sum of points that, if met, will qualify the lead for inclusion in sales activities.
With the point system and the point threshold in hand, the system can now be applied to the database of leads. The information entered by the leads on the website or the form when they responded to the call-to-action will be given points specified in the point system. All the individual points will be added up, and each lead in the database will now have a concrete score to measure against the point threshold. Leads that meet and exceed the point threshold are high-quality leads that can now be considered qualified leads.
