for marketers, a lead score means that you can quickly A marketer must also measure explicit qualities before see the leads you have generated, prioritize them based passing leads on to sales or entering them into nurturing on score, and assign those that are most likely to become tracks to ensure that they fit the organization’s ideal opportunities to sales for follow-up. In order to ensure customer profile. Typical explicit parameters include: that leads don’t get passed on to sales prematurely, • Company size you can place any leads that do not pass a certain scoring threshold on a nurturing track before assigning • Industry them to sales reps. As these leads begin to respond to • Job title nurturing efforts and their scores increase, they can be • Department automatically assigned to sales for follow-up. (Read more • Other custom factors that shed light on a about this in the next chapter.) prospect’s profile for your sales reps, a lead score provides a concrete With marketing automation, marketers can set up a indication of lead engagement before they ever pick up customizable grading system that will tell them at a the phone, so your reps can feel confident that reaching glance if a lead fits their ideal prospect profile, allowing out will be well worth their time. Scoring can also go a them to consider prospect fit in conjunction with their long way toward relieving tensions between sales and accumulated score. marketing by establishing a concrete, objective system for lead qualification. PUTTInG LeAD QUALIfICATIOn TO WORK GRADING LEADS ON ExPLICIT FACTORS Despite being one of the most powerful features of While a lead’s score tells you how interested they are in marketing automation, the lead scoring and grading your company, their grade (expressed as a letter, A-f) model is also one of the most difficult topics to talk tells you how interested you should be. Measuring a lead’s about — simply because your ideal lead qualification interest based on implicit buying signals only tells half of model will ultimately depend on your product, industry, the story. What if your most active lead is just a curious and buyer personas. Many marketing automation intern and has no influence at all on purchase decisions? platforms provide an out-of-the-box scoring and grading model, but it’s important to customize this system to meet your needs in order to reap the full benefits. 14 / Pardot