After a good event you have a hundred contacts in your system. The trouble is they aren't all equally valuable, and a rep's time stays the same. Lead scoring is a method that assigns points to contacts and tells you who to call first. It's a simple idea that genuinely shortens the path to a sale.
Two dimensions you have to combine
A good model doesn't collapse everything into a single number. It assesses two things separately:
- Fit - who the contact is: title, company, industry, size.
- Intent - what they did: visited the profile, downloaded the offer, came to the booth, left their details.
It's worth adding negative points too - signals that a contact probably won't buy, so they don't clutter the priority list.
A simple model in six steps
- Define your ideal customer profile from closed-won deals.
- Pick a handful of fit and intent criteria.
- Assign weights and set thresholds (e.g. "hot" from X points).
- Agree the thresholds together with sales.
- Implement the scoring in your CRM.
- Recalibrate quarterly based on results.
Lead scoring is an informal contract between marketing and sales: agreement on which contact truly deserves a call.
Where the scoring data comes from
A model is only as good as the data feeding it. A contact from an ElitesCards card tap arrives already described: who they are, which company, which event, what actions they took. That's a ready set of fit and intent signals - landing straight in the CRM, so scoring can work from the first second, with no manual retyping.
