Lead scoring is a shared sales and marketing methodology for ranking leads in order to determine their sales-readiness. When scoring a lead, you can determine how closely the leads fit your buyer profile, where they are on their buyer journey, and when a lead is ready to be contacted by sales.
Basically, lead scoring takes all of your lead-generation and nurturing campaigns and provides a methodology to determine how close a person is to purchasing and where she is on the buying journey. A lead score is created in your marketing automation tool.
Scoring should be determined based on the following overall factors:
Fit: How does the lead fit in with your defined buyer persona?
Interest: How interested is the lead in your products?
Buying stage: How far along in the buying journey is the lead?
The score of your lead determines whether he will be fast-tracked to sales or sent back to nurturing.
Lead scoring gives a lead a positive or negative score in your marketing automation tool based on various demographics and behaviors. This means that you have to not only define what a good lead is, but you also have to determine how you score your assets and actions. For instance, you may give downloading a TOFU (top-of-funnel) ebook on a general topic a lower score than downloading a third-party analyst report that helps define purchasing behavior of a lead.