The Magic of Lead Scoring for Builders and Developers

How does your sales team nurture the leads that come in? Do they differentiate the strong leads from the tire-kickers? If you haven’t experienced the magic of lead scoring for builders and developers, you should explore this essential tool.

Imagine if your builder marketing and salespeople could prioritize every lead according to their interest levels. How could they better utilize their time if they could see that some prospective buyers had progressed further in the sales funnel?

That’s what lead scoring strategy can provide.

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring determines the value of a lead. This type of lead management system assigns a points rating to each inbound marketing action identified along the path to purchase, such as opening an email or browsing a website. As the person engages in these actions, they “earn” points. The higher the score, the stronger the lead. When you establish your lead scoring model, you determine the number of points required for a lead to move from one stage to another, which is known as the threshold.

In this way, salespeople can focus on the people who have achieved a score that shows buying intent. They can prioritize leads, approach them based on actionable data, and nurture them in the best way to convert a lead to a sale.

The builder marketing team can also monitor lead scoring to see the effectiveness of their activities. Marketing creates the content and campaigns designed to generate interest. Implementing lead scoring provides a tool for measuring the effectiveness of their efforts.

Benefits of Lead Scoring?

There are several reasons you should implement a lead-scoring strategy in your business.

Enable more effective lead nurturing.

The major advantage of maintaining this type of lead management system is that it helps your Marketing and Sales teams to nurture leads with greater efficiency and effectiveness. They can see the actions taken by a lead, such as looking at a community or floor plan, viewing a video, clicking on a landing page, reading a blog, or commenting on a social post. This knowledge makes it much easier to know the right actions to nudge the lead along.

Strengthen team collaboration.

Marketing and Sales teams often maintain their individual boundaries. Marketing’s task is to generate leads, but they might feel their success is measured by the Sales team’s ability to work those leads. Sales relies on lead generation and often views Marketing’s effectiveness as the quantity of leads they deliver, not the quality.

Lead scoring provides a vital link to connect the lead generation process between these two entities. Marketing tracks the progress of their work and then delivers qualified leads to Sales, empowering them to move forward toward more successful conversion.

Improve the customer experience.

The visibility provided by a good lead scoring strategy delivers insight to Marketing and Sales. They see the actual engagement of every prospective customer. The teams use this knowledge to address the lead’s specific needs and interests. When an interested prospect receives relevant communication—instead of more generic messaging that annoys them—they are more likely to interact with the company.

How Does Lead Scoring Work?

This type of lead management system tracks the buyer journey on a software platform that integrates with your CRM. The model assigns a predetermined number of points for each step taken by the prospective buyer. Much like a loyalty program tracks points to bring a customer to the next reward, lead scoring tracks engagement, a key step in zeroing on your best prospects for sales conversion.

To get started, you must first identify engagement steps and their value within your sales conversion picture. Look at the actions and attributes that are key indicators of a buyer’s interest. 

Next, you assign points to each action, based on those values. For example:

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• Opens an email 5 points
• Clicks on an online ad 5 points
• Shares or comments on a social media post 5 points
• Clicks on a link in an email 8 points
• Visits multiple webpages 12 points
• Downloads content from the site 15 points
• Submits a completed request form 20 points

Your lead scoring model should also measure the lead’s alignment with your targeted demographic profiles. Who are the people most likely to buy from you? Create buyer profiles and assign points to the characteristics that contribute to someone who is a strong lead. Look at criteria such as age, where they currently live, and whether they already own a home. Of course, you’ll have different buyer profiles for your various products, so you will likely need to develop a variety of profiles. Use the data from your available resources, including website activity, email lists, and CRM. 

You Should also Subtract

The lead score isn’t just a sum of all the attributes listed above. To get an accurate assessment of a person’s intention to purchase, you must also consider the negative aspects.

For example, a student who is doing research isn’t a strong lead. Look for an email address with an “edu” suffix or someone who has listed “Student” on their form.

Other negative attributes include:

• Visits Careers page, which signals looking for a job, not considering a purchase.
• Hasn’t opened emails from your business within a defined period (e.g., last 4 emails, 6 months)
• Unsubscribed from your email list
• Email address from a competitor’s company
• Spam form submission
• A prospective vendor, not customer

When you develop your lead scoring model, be sure to include negative points for these types of attributes.

Moving From Marketing to Sales

At what point does a lead move from a marketing qualified lead (MQL) to a sales qualified lead (SQL)?

It’s up to you to determine when a lead is ready to be handed over to the sales team. The purpose of lead scoring is to set the threshold. How many points should the prospective customer accumulate to demonstrate a strong intent to purchase?

As an MQL, the lead moves through the sales funnel, converting on actions you’ve identified as noteworthy. An MQL has completed various activities, like downloading information from your website, signing up to receive your newsletter, or spending significant time browsing your website. When the points accumulate and the prospect reaches the threshold to move to SQL, here’s how the handoff can happen.

• Marketing monitors the activity of the leads to note progress.
• When the lead reaches the scoring threshold to indicate intent to purchase, Marketing forwards the lead to Sales, along with the report of the person’s engagement.
• The lead is evaluated by Sales to decide on the sales action to be taken, based on the lead’s actions to date.

How Do You Set Your Scoring Threshold?

How do you decide when an MQL is ready to become an SQL? You set a threshold. This step is critical to the success of this lead management system. It’s a Goldilocks dilemma to get it right.

If you set the threshold too high, you’re missing sales opportunities. Good leads aren’t handed off soon enough.

Conversely, if you set the lead scoring threshold too low, you’re allowing too many unqualified leads to filter through the system. Your sales team is spending valuable time working leads that aren’t yet ready to convert.

So, how do you get it just right?

Your lead scoring model is based on the actions you’ve identified as important moves through the sales funnel. You assign points to reflect the value of each step. Ask yourself, at what point in this process has a lead engaged in enough activity to show intent to purchase? Look at those actions and then add up the points. There’s your threshold.

Well, for starters.

The lead scoring threshold isn’t a one-and-done calculation. Monitor that point by seeing how it translates in the real world. Is Sales getting good leads at the right spot in the sales funnel? Or are they coming too early or too late?

Review your threshold periodically, once or twice a year. Don’t shift it too often or too severely. When you do make adjustments, do it with intention. What actions and behaviors are you trying to measure with more accuracy? 

Once you’ve changed the threshold, monitor the results for a period and compare them to the same outcomes before you changed this level.

Here’s a caveat: Don’t change your threshold at the same time you’re making key changes in your marketing efforts. Otherwise, you can’t be sure if your threshold adjustment is making the difference in the leads or the marketing content or campaign is responsible.

Put Lead Scoring to Work for Your Business

For builders and developers, lead scoring represents a valuable tool to maximize your Sales and Marketing teams’ time and focus. Create smoother flow as leads move through the sales funnel. Optimize the skills and time of your builder marketing and sales professionals. And deliver a more satisfying experience to your customers, present and future.

Denscty Collective specializes in marketing services for builders and developers, including master plan, mixed, use, and resort development marketing. Denscty Collective offers expertise in lead scoring, sales conversion optimization, and AI-powered marketing services. We thrive on gathering data, analyzing metrics, and then building and executing strategic marketing programs.

Get a fresh look at your business. Contact Denscty Collective to partner with a team that is drilled into your industry, from the challenges you face to the trends that drive change.