Certainly one of the most important, if not the most important, aspect of any marketing automation system is knowing when to pass a lead to sales. When is a lead "sales ready" versus when it really needs to be nurtured further before passing to sales? Since sales resources are expensive and you want sales to follow up on the qualified leads you're passing to them, you need to tailor your lead scoring and nurturing system to your specific process.

When setting up a lead scoring and nurturing system, one item that must be thought through is what score threshold determines when the lead goes to sales and how does that happen. To determine this, you must go through an interactive approach and measure as you go. For instance, determine what multiple interactions and/or demographic information seems to fit a "sales ready" lead. A lead downloads a whitepaper, attends a webinar and has both the right title and industry that fits your lead definition - would that lead be ready for a sales call? Or is a lead that clicked on an email, went to a few product pages and downloaded a case study - is that enough to be considered "sales ready?"

When setting up a lead scoring and nurturing system, you need to define the schema - the different levels of scores and what happens at each. The top level is the score that needs to move to sales. We always suggest that companies, after figuring out what interactions (ie. downloading a whitepaper) and/or what demographic information, run through a series of scenarios to see if their scoring levels make sense. Once the levels feel right, you should implement on a small scale - maybe starting with one campaign.

Next, test to see when leads move from marketing that hit your designed scoring threshold; see how far they go down the sales pipeline. Track how many of these leads are put back into nurture status by sales, that weren't quite ready. Based on those results, you might need to go back and either increase or lower your scoring threshold. Often companies run through this process 2 or 3 times until they feel confident to implement it across all of their campaigns and for all leads. Of course you'll never stop measuring and ensuring that you lead generation ROI is increasing and that sales is doing less lead generation and more selling.

To learn more about how you can change your sales and marketing process to improve efficiencies and stop the leakage by lead nurturing, download our whitepaper on ' The Cost of Not Nurturing Leads ' today!