Chapter 11 Tools of the Trade Determining what leads to work each morning has historically been a very subjective process. Salespeople rely on gut, or worse, work leads in the order they see them arrive in lead queue. Lead scoring provides the ability for your organization and your salespeople to prioritize what leads to work, and then in combination with lead routing and lead nurturing, determine how they should be worked. Only have an email address and no job title? That lead is less valuable — it should be nurtured by marketing automation until it’s more mature. Have a hot lead where the CEO of a large enterprise has looked at your pricing page? Lead scoring and routing will ensure that it lands on top of the heap for your best salesperson. In short, salespeople can leave low-value leads to marketing automation, freeing up their time to focus on those most likely to turn into revenue most quickly. Sales can begin their day by reviewing a hot list of which leads are most likely to convert instead of guessing which to invest time in. Lead Routing Once a lead score is in place, leads can easily be routed in your CRM system. The rules that determine where a lead should be sent can be built to examine the lead score and to follow your organization’s territories or industry sales patches. For example, a score below 50 could be left in a queue for marketing automation to work. One that was over 50, from the automotive industry, and in the United States could be sent to the sales rep. While an almost identical lead that was from Britain could instead be sent to your European channel partner. Lead Nurturing Lead nurturing helps solve the problem of warming the leads that aren’t ready for sales to pursue. Leads are valuable, and just because their information is incomplete or they aren’t ready to be pursued by the sales team doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore them. Lead nurturing allows startups with very finite human resources to seem much bigger than they are. The most obvious application is to send automated warming emails to a lead after they download a resource. Their lead score is too low to justify having a human pursue them, but with no effort, you can have those leads receive regular emails that appear to be from a sales rep, staying in touch, keeping your organization top of mind.