Lead scoring

Why it matters

Not every lead is worth the same phone call. A school getting 300 enquiries a month cannot call all of them the same day, and a real estate team cannot spend an hour on every portal inquiry. Lead scoring turns "who first?" into a rule: points for fit (is this the kind of customer we serve?) and points for behaviour (are they acting like someone about to buy?). Sales works from the top of the list down.

It works best when it is simple, visible in your CRM, and checked against what actually closed.

How to build a model

1. Start from closed customers. Look at your last 30 to 50 wins: what did they have in common, and what did they do before enquiring?
2. Choose 5 to 8 signals and assign points. Strong intent (a demo or visit request) should outweigh weak (an email opened).
3. Add negative scores for students, job seekers, competitors, wrong location or wrong budget.
4. Set a threshold that moves a lead to the next stage, and a speed promise for it.
5. Review every quarter. Compare scores with outcomes and change the weights.

Common mistakes

• Building a clever model on no data. With fewer than a few dozen wins, a simple rule and a human judgement beat a formula.
• Scoring activity, not intent. Ten email opens can mean a bored person with a tidy inbox.
• Never decaying scores. A pricing page visit from six months ago is stale.
• Keeping sales out of it. If they do not trust the score, they will ignore it.

BridgeE builds scoring into CRM and marketing automation and ties it to lead generation, so the score decides who gets the first call.