Everyone is treated the same
A person who asked for a price and a person who clicked an ad by accident enter the CRM as identical rows. The rep finds out the difference by spending twenty minutes each.
That is not a problem with your marketing. It is what a lead list is. The problem is that nobody knows which ones, so your team works the list top to bottom and burns its best hours on people who were never going to buy.
We put a qualification layer between the enquiry and the rep. Every lead arrives already asked, already scored, already routed, with the reasoning written down so you can argue with it.
Four failures that look like a sales problem and are actually a sorting problem.
A person who asked for a price and a person who clicked an ad by accident enter the CRM as identical rows. The rep finds out the difference by spending twenty minutes each.
First-in-first-out means the most valuable lead of the week waits behind forty that are not. By the time anyone reaches it, it has bought elsewhere.
“Not interested” is not a reason, it is a shrug. Without a recorded reason you cannot tell a bad lead source from a bad follow-up, so you keep paying for both.
A lead who said “not this quarter” is worth calling next quarter. That almost never happens, because nothing in the system remembers to.
Six stages, all visible, none of them a black box.
Which ad, which page, how long they stayed, what they clicked, what they typed. The form gives you a name and a number; the behaviour tells you how serious they are.
Every business has three or four answers that predict a close. In real estate it is budget, location, timeline and whether they have seen anything else. We work out yours, then the chatbot or voice agent collects them on every lead.
Company, role, rough size where it is publicly available and relevant. Enough to know whether the person on the phone can actually sign.
Not a generic template. The weights come from which of your past leads actually closed, so the score means something in your business rather than in general.
Hot goes straight to a rep or a live call. Warm goes to the voice agent to book. Cold goes to nurture with a date to come back. Nothing goes nowhere.
Each lead carries the answers, the score and the reason for its routing. When you review the pipeline you are reading evidence, not recollection.
Worth reading if you have been sold scoring before and were not impressed.
A lead score is a prediction, and a prediction is only useful if you can check it. The common failure is a score assembled from whatever data happened to be available, weighted by intuition, presented as a number between one and a hundred. It feels rigorous and it is not, because nobody ever goes back to ask whether the eighties closed more often than the sixties.
The version worth building is narrower and duller. Pick the three or four attributes your own closed deals actually shared. Weight them by how strongly they separated closed from lost in your history, not in a benchmark. Then re-check the weights every quarter against what has happened since, and change them when the market changes.
This also means a score should never be the only thing a rep sees. It should sit next to the answers that produced it, so a good rep can override it. A score that cannot be argued with is a score that will quietly be ignored.
It helps but it is not required. If you are working out of a spreadsheet we can start there and move you onto something proper once the pipeline is running. Migrating first tends to delay everything by a month for no gain.
From your closed deals, not from a template. We look at what your won leads had in common that your lost ones did not. If you have too little history to do that honestly, we start with something simple and revise it after the first sixty days rather than pretending to precision we do not have.
Yes, and they should be able to. The score sits next to the answers that produced it. A rep who can see why a lead scored low can also see when the score is wrong, and that feedback is how the weights improve.
They go into nurture with a date attached, not into a bin. “Not this quarter” is a timing answer, and the system comes back at the right time. That pool is usually the cheapest revenue in the funnel.
Scoring needs history to be meaningful, so at low volume the qualification and routing matter far more than the score. We would set up the questions and the routing first and add weighted scoring once there is enough data to justify it.
Fourteen days to a pipeline where every lead arrives asked, scored and routed, with the reasoning attached.