Overview

Some organizations can have hundreds, even thousands of leads in their CRM at a time. The question then becomes - how do you manage so many leads? How do you know which ones are worth chasing, and which might not be? How do you know how your sales team are progressing with their leads?

This is why we have something called "lead scoring". A lead score is a number, or a few numbers, associated with a lead that give you an idea of how important that lead is.

In AssignCRM, the lead scoring system is called GAIM - this is an acronym to describe the four factors we track. All of the scores are numbers between 1 and 10.

G is for Good Fit. This describes whether you think that the products they're interested in are a good fit for their functional requirements. Typically you'd need to first learn their requirements, then see whether the features of the products and services you provide match those requirements. If there's a perfect match, it would be 10. If it's not much of a fit, it would be a 1.

A is for Affordable. This describes whether your product or services fit into the budget they had in mind. Again you'd typically have to first determine what budget they have available, and what competition you'd be up against. If you're not sure or it's not affordable, it would be a low number. If you believe you fit right in with their budget, it could be a 10.

I is for Interest. This is the most important score - it's whether they're interested in the product or service. A higher number means they're very interested, a lower number means they're not that interested. This one is related to the Good Fit score, but may not be the same. For example you may know it's a great fit but they may not understand the product to know that themselves. In that case the Good Fit score may be high, but the Interest score may be low. What does that mean? It means you need to educate them to raise the interest level.

M is for Magnitude. This reflects the overall potential upside of the deal. If your client is a local resident it may not have a high magnitude, but if it's a corporation with many uses for your services over potentially many years, then the magnitude would be high. The same would go for a partner or potential reseller.

These four metrics come together to create our GAIM score - and with our GAIM chart they let us easily visualize the importance of potentially hundreds or thousands of leads.

Now we'll discuss how the GAIM score is managed and tracked.