Lead Scoring

Whether your business is growing or you work with a high volume of leads, lead scoring will help you address the most important leads quickly and prioritize the rest.

Step 1: Find your ideal customer

The way we score our leads at Close will likely differ from how you want to score yours. The first step in understanding which leads you should prioritize is to find your ideal customer. We wrote a full post and created this template for you if you don't already have an ideal customer.

Step 2: Determine your ideal customer criteria

Write down a list of criteria that your ideal customers have in common. Here's some examples:

• Company size
• Industry
• Location
• Job title
• Source
• Funding or financial situation
• They opted-in for an event, a newsletter, or they filled out a form on your website
• They signed up for a trial
• They came from a specific ad

Step 3: Track criteria in Close

Track the criteria from Step 2 using Custom Fields, Custom Activities, or any other Close fields.

You might need to add new Custom Fields to your Close setup.

If you need to bulk update or add Custom Fields for hundreds or thousands of leads, we recommend these options:

• If you can easily find the leads you need to update using another tag like a lead status, a #code, an opportunity, etc., use Search to filter the leads you need and bulk update the Custom Field by clicking the three dots at the top-right corner of your list, choose Bulk Edit, then Update a Custom Field, and pick the Custom Field and value you want to add.

• If you can't easily search and filter the leads you want to update, export your leads as a CSV and add one column per Custom Field. When you re-import your leads, make sure you check for duplicates to add the new value to your existing leads rather than creating brand new duplicate leads.

• Make sure you are using the right Custom Field types for each individual piece of data. Examples:

  • Company size could be a multiple choice if you store it as a range or a number if you want to create a range using Smart Views.
  • Industry could be a multiple choice.
  • Job title could be a multiple choice.
  • Source could be a multiple choice.
  • Funding could be a number.
  • Even opt-in, Trial signup, or ad source could be a multiple choice.

Step 4: Create Smart Views

Use the criteria you've stored in Close to create a Smart View for each score or prioritization level. Here's an example.

• High Priority Leads:
  • Company size: 100+ employees
  • Industry: Technology
  • Job title: Manager
  • Funding: $500,000+
  • They have an opt-in or signed up for a trial

• Medium Priority Leads:
  • Company size: 50-99 employees
  • Industry: Technology
  • Funding: $500,000+
  • They have an opt-in

• Low Priority Leads:
  • Company size: 1-50 employees
  • Doesn't show up in High or Medium Priority Leads Smart View

Step 5: What's next?

Once you've scored and prioritized your leads, you can use these lists in a multitude of scenarios. Here's a few examples:

• Lead assignment: You can assign higher priority leads to senior reps or keep low priority leads for onboarding reps.
• Task prioritization: Your sales reps can use these lists to prioritize their day. For example, if you use the "Lead Owner" Custom Field to assign leads to your reps, they can add "custom.lead owner" in ("Me") to any of the above Smart Views to see their high, medium, and low priority leads.
• Processes and workflows: If your follow up processes differ depending on a lead score or priority, use your new scoring lists to set up a workflow for your reps using Smart Views.