Lead Scoring with Salesforce.com

There are several ways to handle lead scoring in salesforce, including using formula fields or building apex triggers, but one of the easiest is the Force.com Lead Scoring App. This is a terrific app that Salesforce Labs have built, and best of all, it's free.


How does Lead Scoring work?
The Force.com Lead Scoring app is a simple packaged installation from the appexchange. Once you have it deployed in your instance, you'll see an app in the top right drop down for "Lead Scoring". Select this, and you can start.

The first step is to create Lead Scoring rules. The lead scoring app has a simple interface that allows you to enter in each rule and the criteria for the rule.

Entering in a Lead Scoring Rule

For each rule you create, you simply need to enter in the type of rule, how many points the rule is worth if it is met, and then the criteria for the rule. For example, if your company targets Technology companies, you could enter a rule that says if the Industry equals "High Tech" for a lead, that lead gets 25 points.

Now, one of the best features of the lead scoring app, is not only can you score off of values from the lead, but you can create scores based on Campaign Membership that the lead is associated with. Have a very important email campaign that you want to make sure the responses go to the top of the list? You can set the score so a Response to that campaign is worth any number of points and have it moved to the top of the call queue. The lead scoring is cumulative, so a lead can score across multiple rules. In total, the application supports up to 200 separate rules, counting both leads & campaign member rule types.

Overall, for a free application, this is a tough one to beat. The fact it can support lead & campaign member type rules, and can have up to 200 rules immediately makes it much more robust then something you can do with formula fields. The ease of which you can add new rules couple with an easy interface to activate and deactivate rules as needed makes it an easy choice over custom code if your business rules support it.

Parting Tips
If this is something that interests you, here are some quick tips we've found when deploying this with our clients.

• Get your business rules down first. This app makes lead scoring very easy to implement, but you still need to understand your business to come up with rules that make sense. Be sure to map that out before rolling this out. That said, you could easily implement this in stealth mode and use it as a way to collect data, before doing a full roll-out. 
• Don't try to be perfect the first time. While it's important to understand your business and roll out a good rule set, it doesn't need to be perfect. Lead Scoring inevitably leads to surprises and hidden gems of lead segments that you never realized were such high quality. A tool like this helps you adapt quickly as you uncover these changes. In addition, the lead scoring app includes a simple button that allows you to re-score all of your leads as you make lead scoring modifications. 
• While the interface for lead scoring only allows you to select one lead field at a time, you can create more complex logic by creating a formula field, and then referring to that with the lead scoring rule. If you have a rule that needs multiple criteria to be met (High Tech companies with over $1B in revenue for example) the formula field is the way to go for that
• The scores update each time you edit the lead. Be sure to include qualification data that your sales reps are trying to collect when they speak to your leads into the model. This way the score is adjusting as you learn more about your leads.
• Finally, don't be afraid to use negative score values. Sometimes the best result is knowing who not to call. If there is a segment that you know is not worth the resources to pursue, assign them with a negative score and have them removed from your call queues.