#AskJon: How do I develop a lead scoring system?

The first thing you need to understand is: what is lead scoring? Lead scoring is assigning points to interactions you have with the people that are in your email database. And, the best way to keep track of that, is to load your email database into a CRM system like HubSpot or Salesforce.

Once you have that set up, you can assign a number of points to each interaction— like, every time they come back to one of your blog posts, or every time they come back to your website, or if they answer questions on your drop-down menu. And, you can basically put together a roster of all those things, assign points to them and then come up with a threshold — let’s say 20 points — and when they hit that 20 points, that’s when they reach the level of a sales or marketing lead.

For some organizations, you might want to go to your salespeople, and say, and ask them “how many times do we want to contact to come back to our content before we can hand that lead off to you?” So, that’s a way to back into the number of points that you’ll need in order for those contacts to become a marketing or sales lead.