Business Rules for Lead Scoring

We see a wide spectrum of CRM solutions in our conversations with our customers. Everything from home grown systems to Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics have strengths and weaknesses as they fulfill their role in the enterprise stack. Business rules can provide an additional layer of intelligence to your sales stack regardless of what CRM you are using.

In this role, business rules can:

• Monitor and take action on events.
• Evaluate and return true/false result.
• Evaluate and return a score that is used throughout the rest of the lead lifecycle.

For lead scoring specifically we can evaluate leads on a variety of different attributes. These attributes are only limited by what data you provide to the rule engine. It could be as simple as a score based upon lead source and company size. Or it could be as complex as what the temperature was in Chicago at the time the lead was received, and if that falls within an acceptable range. Its a ridiculous example, but illustrates the idea that other data sources can be aggregated either through direct lookup or web service call to contribute to this score.

You could also break up scores into buckets that drive action down the road. For example, you could construct sub-scores upon different combinations of attributes that feed a top level lead quality score. Each of these sub-scores could be referenced for other decisions that need to be made down the road, such as prioritizing follow-up or flagging for a certain account manager.

At the end of the day, lead scoring with business rules should add value in the sales process. The additional information should reduce manual labor and improve the customer experience through well informed points of interaction.