In a perfect world you would fill your sales pipeline with loads of high-quality leads that all get accepted by sales. Keep dreaming, the reality is some what different.

Marketing automation vendors have created a lot of buzz around lead management, and specifically the role lead scoring plays in filtering out leads that aren’t sales ready so they can be nurtured. What can often get overlooked is lead scoring really is not a one fits all solution. It needs to be matched to your sales process, your market and the resources you have at hand.

For companies creating a high volume of inquiries and leads, it makes sense to score and filter leads until they are sales ready. After all there is only a certain volume of leads that a salesperson can handle and you want them focusing on the deals that are most likely to convert. Yet for many smaller or niche businesses this is not the case, any inquiry is important and offers potential.

One of the issues with a lead scoring system is not all leads will conform and you risk missing out.  Lead scoring can be viewed in 3 ways:

1. How much information is given, and how complete is that information.

2. How relevant is that lead to your business.

3. How willingly are those that inquired to enter into a dialogue with you.

These 3 factors define the quality of your lead but a scoring system can be misleading as it will always focus on the norm and not the specific.

Some of these factors will be out of your control, and you can be misled by a cut off point. You may miss a big opportunity simply because the inquirer did not fill out the form correctly or adhere to your selling process.

If you’re volume of leads and conversion rate is greater enough for you to able to afford miss a few to do this then all well and good, but this is still a dream for many of us.  Ask yourself can you afford to miss that big opportunity, or should you be a bit more flexible in your approach to lead scoring.