Paul McConville, Director of Consumer-Facing Services , TARGUSinfo You Asked How can I better define which inbound leads are more likely to convert so I can prioritize them more effectively?

You’re a marketer, not some kind of psychic. You’d likely just be guessing if you tried to determine which inbound leads you wanted to talk to first and how to adjust your messages and offers to them. To send your best salespeople the leads that are more likely to convert, place higher-value orders or become loyal customers, you’d first have to take a few minutes with each lead to ask a series of important questions.

An approach called on-demand lead scoring can help by providing the right knowledge at the right moment to increase your sales conversions, customer value and retention. By combining your customer information with consumer data, predictive analytics and real-time technology, lead scoring can tell you how to prioritize and treat each incoming lead for the best outcome.

Now you probably wouldn’t want career advice from someone who doesn’t know your work or your industry … and you shouldn’t leave that perspective out of your lead scoring, either. The more your lead scoring is tailored to your specific business, your customers and your objectives, the more predictive and actionable it will be.

Taking this into account, you can create customized scores with detailed household information including behavioral information, demographics and lifestyle information. Add your own data, including sales history, product and channel usage and campaign response history. The resulting blend of information will provide you with razor-sharp insight on the best, most valuable leads for your business.

There are three things to keep in mind as you consider a lead scoring approach:

1) You won’t get real return on your analytics if you can’t access and leverage this insight on demand, at the moment you’re interacting with leads. Most consulting firms’ customer insight platforms don’t allow this capability.

2) Your lead scoring is only as good as the underlying information that drives it. You wouldn’t put dirty gasoline in your Rolls Royce so why would you infuse dirty data into your lead-scoring solution? If your lead scoring solution doesn’t include verification of contact information, then you won’t even know which leads can be reached, making the entire effort worthless. Up-to-date consumer contact information is crucial to the success of any lead scoring effort.

3) Off-the-shelf lead scoring systems typically rely on consumer profiles that aren’t even tailored to your industry, much less your company, so they provide uneven results when used to drive your real-time decisions. Scores must reflect your particular business or they have little value to the bottom line.

Consider the lead-scoring learnings of a direct response marketer of fitness equipment: It spends millions onadvertising to drive prospects to its 800-numbers and Web sites. In sub-second time, incoming calls are scored according to their potential value. High-value, likely-to-convert prospects are immediately routed to the best agents, eliminating wait times and improving service. The callers who are least likely to convert are routed to an interactive voice response system, allowing the likely-to-convert callers to get more attention from agents.

Before the start of each call the direct response marketing company also uses lead scores to determine which complimentary products are best suited to the caller, in addition to the offer that spurred the call. It’s an improvement to the caller experience that has produced higher conversion rates and higher revenue with the same, albeit more productive, staff.

Before the sales team receives a lead, the direct response marketer’s Web leads are verified and prioritized the same way. Leads are automatically scored based on verified contact information and the direct response marketer’s measured likelihood of converting customers who fit the lead’s profile.

Now fully equipped to prioritize the leads that are most valuable to them, the sales team is able to push the most promising leads to the top of the queue for an immediate outbound call. Each call begins with a huge head start for the sales team: At the instant each lead arrives, its score determines which messages are most suitable, triggering a customized script. While the top leads get first attention, others are prioritized for follow up. Strategies like these ensure the direct response marketer takes better advantage of its advertising spend.

End result, with on-demand lead scoring you can focus on the leads that are important to you and get more results from your marketing dollars.

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