How do you decide which leads are your best? Are they all “hot”?  Even if you have a shortage of leads during this economic downturn, every person that responds to your emails or posts on your Facebook page is not necessarily a hot lead.  (Even if you have the capacity to make every lead hot, you are doing yourself a disservice by scaring away those that aren’t ready to be considered hot.)

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Every business that operates through lead acquisition needs a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_scoring">lead scoring</a> metric. You instinctively do this in your mind, but you need a defined strategy to effectively close more deals and spend less time focused on the “non-hot.”  Sounds like a no brainer, right?

To begin harnessing your leads effectively, you can start by:
<ol>
	<li><strong>Develop a scoring model</strong>: Extract what you do mentally and put it on paper. Create a 1 to 10 numeric system or sales process system and define what each number is and what specific actions this lead does to become a certain number.</li>
	<li><strong>Integrated Marketing: </strong>Now that they have a rating, you can decide how to market to them.  A hot 10 would get a phone call and emails about pricing plans.  A 1 gets your generic monthly newsletter until they make an actionable step forward towards another rating.</li>
	<li><strong>Use it: </strong>It sounds simple, but you must follow the rules established in your metric and make sure the rest of the organization does too. Now, when your CEO comes to you with a lead that her brother’s barber knows, you have a way to not stop the entire business’s operations just to act on this lead.</li>
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Be diligent and you’ll see how to effectively navigate a lead ranked as a 1 into a closed deal, without scaring them off with intense pricing conversations right away.