The Ultimate Guide to Prioritizing Sales Leads in 2023

In today‘s fast-paced, digital-first B2B sales environment, most reps are drowning in leads. Between website inquiries, email clicks, social media mentions, event scans, referrals, and more, it‘s not uncommon for a single SDR to be tasked with managing hundreds or even thousands of leads at once.

With so many prospects to juggle, it‘s simply not feasible to treat every lead equally. Reps who try to work every lead in their pipeline sequentially, or on a first-in-first-out basis, will ultimately hurt their ability to hit quota. Speed to lead is one of the most important factors in sales success – according to InsideSales, 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first.

To put this in perspective, let‘s say a rep gets 100 new leads each week, with the following breakdown:

Priority Tier # of Leads Followup SLA Win Rate
Tier 1 – High 15 5 minutes 20%
Tier 2 – Medium 35 1 hour 10%
Tier 3 – Low 50 1 day 2%

If the rep tried to work every lead in order, the hottest opportunities in Tier 1 likely would have gone cold by the time they got to them, tanking the 20% win rate. But if the rep works the Tier 1 leads first, they have a shot at closing 3 deals from just 15 conversations.

The old sales playbook of "spray and pray" is no longer effective. Modern reps need to ruthlessly prioritize which leads get their time and attention, ensuring the highest-intent prospects are always worked first. But how do you determine which leads are "hot" and which are not? Enter: Behavioral lead scoring.

Defining a Behavioral Lead Scoring Model

The most effective way to prioritize leads is by scoring them based on the level of interest and sales-readiness they‘ve demonstrated through recent interactions with your company. Each action a lead takes – like opening an email, visiting your website, filling out a form, etc. – is assigned a certain point value. Leads are then ranked by their total score and slotted into priority tiers.

Here‘s an example behavioral scoring model from HubSpot:

Action Point Value
Became a marketing qualified lead 100
Requested a demo 80
Multiple page views 45
Submitted a form 40
Clicked a link in an email 20
Opened an email 10

Based on these parameters, here‘s how a set of leads might be scored and prioritized:

Lead Name Activity Score Priority
Jane Doe Became an MQL, requested demo 180 Tier 1
John Smith Multiple page views, clicked link 65 Tier 2
Sally Jones Opened email, one page view 10 Tier 3

By sorting leads using this type of scoring methodology, sales teams can implement a standardized system for prioritizing outreach. The higher the score, the more ready a prospect is to buy, and the faster reps should follow up.

Of course, for this to work, you need a way to track and calculate scores automatically as leads engage. This is where your CRM and sales engagement platforms come into play.

Using Your Tech Stack for Automated Lead Prioritization

The key to making behavioral lead scoring scalable is automation. Manual tracking and calculation simply isn‘t realistic when dealing with a high volume of leads and activities.

Instead, leverage the lead intelligence capabilities of your CRM. Platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Outreach can automatically log activities like email opens, content downloads, website visits, etc. and assign point values based on rules you define.

For example, in HubSpot, you can set up a lead scoring property that adds or subtracts points based on demographic info and behavior. Any contact with a score over a certain threshold is considered a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and gets routed to sales.

HubSpot lead scoring
Image Source: HubSpot

The other crucial piece of tech is real-time notification. Speed is the name of the game when it comes to lead follow-up. Drift found that sales teams are 7x more likely to have meaningful conversations with a lead if they respond in the first 5 minutes versus 30 minutes.

Make sure you have real-time alerts set up so reps are notified immediately when MQLs take high-value actions – like viewing pricing pages or requesting demos. The ability to strike while the iron is hot can make or break your lead conversion rates.

Establishing SLAs for Lead Response

Tech-enabled lead scoring does no good if reps aren‘t held accountable to following through on the prioritization hierarchy. This is where service level agreements, or SLAs, come into play.

SLAs set the ground rules for how quickly reps must follow up with leads in each priority tier. Typical B2B SLAs look like this:

  • Tier 1 Leads (Demo Requests, MQLs): Call within 5 minutes, email within 30 minutes
  • Tier 2 Leads (Multiple Web Visits, Pricing Page): Email same day and call within 24 hours
  • Tier 3 Leads (Single Email Click): Email within 1 week

Adherence to SLAs should be one of the core KPIs that sales managers coach reps towards. Use reports in your CRM to track average lead response times by tier and rep to identify coaching opportunities.

Putting SLAs into practice requires both rep buy-in and enablement. During training and onboarding, emphasize the importance of fast follow-up on high-intent leads. Then make sure reps have the tools and techniques to hit the SLA targets.

For example, you could load email templates into your sales engagement platform so reps can quickly personalize and send SLA-compliant emails with one click. Create a dashboard widget that alerts reps when they have an SLA task upcoming or overdue.

The more you can bake SLAs into the workflows and systems reps use every day, the higher the adoption will be.

Analyzing Lead Source Data

As you track lead behaviors and outcomes over time, patterns will emerge regarding which types of leads convert at the highest rates. In particular, pay attention to lead sources – i.e. how prospects originally find your business.

Here‘s a comparison of average lead-to-opportunity conversion rates by source from Implisit:

Lead Conversion Rates by Source
Image Source: Implisit

Referrals convert at nearly 4x the rate of web forms – that‘s a massive difference! If you‘re not already, start tracking lead source in your CRM so you can analyze this data across your own pipeline.

Reps should use lead source data to further prioritize prospects. For example, two leads with identical behavioral scores may be weighted differently if one came from a referral and the other from a cold list.

You can also use lead source info to provide more relevant, personalized messaging and content to prospects. For instance, if a lead was referred by one of your customers, the rep could name drop that connection in their outreach.

Over time, lead source data should also inform your demand generation strategy. If webinars are consistently producing opportunities that close, double down on those programs! Alternatively, if social media leads rarely convert to pipeline, it may be worth reallocating resources elsewhere.

Conclusion

In the old days of sales, reps had the luxury of chasing down every lead that came across their desk. But in the era of inbound, where leads are plentiful but sales capacity is not, prioritization is a must.

Implement a behavioral scoring system to rank leads by sales readiness. Leverage automation to track engagement data and trigger real-time notifications. Coach reps to SLAs to ensure the fastest follow-up on the best leads. Analyze lead trends to refine your tactics.

Ultimately, effective lead prioritization comes down to focusing limited sales resources on the right leads at the right time. It‘s a simple concept – but one that requires the right mix of people, process, and technology to execute.

Looking for more resources on how to level up your lead management? Check out these guides:

Happy prioritizing!

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