Optify's Lead Scoring application provides a simple and effective way to evaluate your leads by assigning them a score based on qualities that you specify. The collection of scores used to evaluate leads is called a score set. Although Optify comes with a default score set, the real power of Lead Scoring lies in creating your own custom score sets according to the needs of your business. Here are a few basic tips to help you create an effective score set:

• Look at your Lead Intelligence application and find what you consider to be a good prospect lead. Look at their interaction with your site – e.g., the source by which they first visited, the pages they've visited, the timing of visits, and their industry
• Create your score set using rules that include several elements from both of two dimensions: Prospect profile and Prospect interest
  
  • Prospect profile elements are identifying data about the lead that may indicate the lead's appropriateness for your business, such as Company Name, Industry, Revenue Size, Employee Size, Title, Geography (city, state, country, zip), source of traffic (paid search terms, email, twitter) :
  • Prospect interest elements measure the activity and engagement of the lead on the site, as reflected in the Number of visits, Number of page views per visit, last visit date, and so on.

• Include a rule that boosts the score for visits to pages that indicate a deeper interest, such as a pricing page, a demo page, product pages/data sheets, or a compelling white paper.
• When building a rule that contains a criterion for a number of names — such as a rule that boosts a score for visitors from any of several companies — putting the list into a single rule will improve the balance of the score set. To do so, construct your rule as follows:
  

  Company Name    starts with     microsoft,oracle,accenture

• Create more than one score set. The score sets can be focused on how the sales teams are organized (geography, industry, product, size) or can be different versions of the same focus.  Once you have created them and Optify has re-scored your leads,  go to the Lead Intelligence application and use the drop down in the upper right corner to change the active score set and see how each score set impacts the lead scores of the leads in the list.

• When creating a rule that uses state abbreviations (East Coast vs West Coast for example), just use the two-letter abbreviation (WA, NV, etc.). A good Northwest Lead Score Rule would look like this:
  
  State  is  wa,or,id,mt
• When creating a rule that includes the industry metric, make sure to use the exact names of industries as they appear in the data that comes to us from Jigsaw, as in the list below:

 *   Agriculture & Mining
 *   Business Services
 *   Computers & Electronics
 *   Consumer Services
 *   Education
 *   Energy & Utilities
 *   Financial Services
 *   Government
 *   Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, & Biotech
 *   Manufacturing
 *   Media & Entertainment
 *   Non-Profit
 *   Other
 *   Real Estate & Construction
 *   Retail
 *   Software & Internet
 *   Telecommunications
 *   Transportation & Storage
 *   Travel, Recreation, and Leisure
 *   Wholesale & Distribution

• Watch, assess, and continue to refine your score sets as time goes on and you acquire more data. Your sales team is in an especially good position to provide feedback as to the effectiveness of your scoring system in helping them to locate the most valuable leads. 

More resources

For more information and tips on creating and using lead scores, see the following:

• Getting started with Lead Scoring
• Webinar: Optify best practices: Lead Scoring
• Using regular expressions in Optify rules
• Find your top converting keywords
• Five steps to scoring leads by their company's industry