How hot are your prospects? Eloqua's SVP says lead scoring solves the direct marketing riddle.

It's a prospect's nightmare: His initial response to a product or service opened the flood gates to a sea of one-way communications regarding a product or service he is no longer interested in. He may simply ignore the email messages, direct mail pieces and calls from sales representatives, or may go further and avoid the company that's responsible altogether.

Alternatively, it's a marketer' nightmare: A prospect wants to learn more but her interest goes unnoticed. She may seek out a competitor's product or service instead.

The solution to both problems is a lead-scoring system, a methodology that gives marketers the ability to more effectively sort leads according to their interests. Lead scoring combines information for those prospects that are likely to buy -- like their title, company size or industry -- with information that shows their interests in the form of actions like website visits, downloads and positive responses to marketing offers. These activities are telling cues that demonstrate a prospect's motivations and plans. 

At its most basic level, lead scoring enables marketers to quantify and track these cues in relation to one another to determine how close a prospect is to making a purchase decision and what activities or offers might take the person one step closer.

In other words, lead scoring combines demographic information with activity information. As a result, marketers can see how "hot" a lead really is.

How important is this? Should all interactive marketers employ lead scoring with their campaigns?

Consider this: Several years ago, a Sirius Decisions report found that the average B2B marketing operation only utilizes 6 percent of the leads it generates each year. That means 94 percent of the average B2B marketing department's efforts are not being used by sales or contributing to the bottom line.

Is it any wonder then that the average CMO keeps his job for less than two years? Or that a report by the TAS Group this spring reported that more than 50 percent of all sales professionals fail to reach quota?

In its report, Sirius Solutions noted that, "the battle between competitors is being won and lost at the top of the funnel." When comparing companies that excel with those that struggle -- the very companies where sales professionals aren't making quota and CMOs don't last long -- the conversion rates at the bottom of the funnel are nearly the same, but they differ greatly at the top where leads are scored.

The message is clear: Lead scoring is the reason why some marketing departments and sales forces succeed where others fail. These companies aren't sending communications or wasting sales representatives' time on prospects who aren't going to buy. Nor are they waiting for truly hot leads to mature with time alone. They know to put their demand-generation power behind those leads that have a high probability of closing.

For marketers who rely on interactive media, something as important as lead generation should be equally interactive.

So how do you put it to work in your organization? There are four basic steps to planning and implementing an interactive lead-scoring system:

1. Get sales and marketing on the same page regarding the definition of leads and opportunities.
2. Track your prospects' activities in comprehensive prospect profiles that are regularly updated and shared with the marketing and sales organizations.
3. Determine your prospects' "interest" indicators -- activities or responses that best predict behavior -- and assign a score to those activities. For example, "VP Title = 5 points" or "website visit = 10 points."
4. Implement a marketing platform that can aggregate these scores in real-time and share them with the sales force.

Of course, getting these lead-scoring systems right is not easy. They need to be monitored constantly for improvement. Just as leads change in their scoring as they move up and down the funnel, so too must the system used to score them be modified as prospects' attitudes change and new forms of communication are implemented by marketers. But by honing the lead-scoring system based on the success of real marketing campaigns, you can ensure that your organization is interactive throughout all its sales and marketing processes. In the end you'll close far more deals.

Thor Johnson is SVP marketing for Eloqua. Read full bio.