Lead Scoring Should Influence Your Web Forms

By Jason Stewart  - June 18, 2007

Web forms should be tailored to collect the information that helps you score lead quality, not discover lead geography.

Targeted landing pages and their importance to well-planned PPC advertising campaigns is not a new topic. Part of Yahoo’s new strategy to improve performance of their PPC programs, for example, focuses on the “quality score” of your ad and the relevance of the landing page it points to. More and more B2B marketers are getting this right, but are still dropping the ball when it comes to collecting the information that is most important to identifying the best and hottest leads coming out of their web marketing efforts.

Are you asking for the right stuff?

When it comes to forms on the web, the more you ask for from a prospect, the less likely they are to give you anything. This is getting to be common knowledge, and yet the temptation is always there to ask for information that can be easily found over the internet -- or even within your own database. Is it really necessary to get CITY, STATE, COUNTRY, PHONE NUMBER when a simple visit to the prospects website will uncover most of that information? If you don’t lose the prospect altogether, you are likely to get erroneous information anyway.

Consider creating a scoring guide in conjunction with your sales team. Find out what they consider to be a good lead, and what some of the common traits or characteristics of their most recent wins are. If they have noticed, for example, that manufacturing is a hot space then make sure you find out if that prospect is a manufacturer. Ask them to share their industry on your forms…or better yet, provide a picklist featuring all the industries that are relevant to you right now. By sparing them the effort of typing in their info they are more likely to answer your questions, and if they select something “Other” than the industries you are focused on you don’t even need to spend time researching or qualifying them.


Here is an example of what a scoring chart might look like, rating leads on a scale from 1 to 100 (click to enlarge). By tailoring the information you ask for on your forms to synch up with your lead scoring guide,  you can spend less time qualifying those names before you send them to your salespeople. And they are guaranteed to be names they want to follow up with.

Comments

[Perry]

I have been using lead scoring in managing my insurance leads, and I should stay that it's never really easy. However, as long as you can work closely with your sales agent and the use of software for lead management, you can be more comfortable with lead scoring.

[agent tips]

Having a good CRM is a must for having accurate lead scoring. I could never as an agent determine the relative value of my different types of lead generation and sources to determine accurate ROI untill I had one of these in place.