Four or five things separate a lead worth an hour from one worth an email, and in most businesses nobody has written them down. This is the piece of work that writes them down, gets them signed by the person who owns the sales number, and turns them into routing your CRM can act on.
Not open yet. You will need to know roughly what you spend on traffic each month. Nothing else.
What a band is for
Calendar on the result page, call the same week
Dated follow-up written against what they answered
Sequence, no call, revisit when an answer changes
The remediation list, and nothing from your sales team
Illustrative. The real bands and the actions attached to them come out of your own answer distribution, which does not exist until responses do.
The problem
Marketing counts leads. Sales counts the ones worth ringing. Nobody has ever put the difference on paper, so the argument restarts every quarter.
Your sales team says the leads are rubbish. Marketing says the volume is up and the pipeline is not their problem after handover. Both accounts are accurate and neither is the disagreement.
The real disagreement is that qualified means two different things in two rooms, and there is no document either side can point at. So it gets settled by whoever is more annoyed that week, and the same conversation happens again in three months.
A scoring model is that document. It is not a piece of software and it is not a feature. It is four or five named factors, what each is worth, where the lines fall and what happens on each side of them, signed by both rooms before anything is built.
The method
Take this and hold your own model against it. If it only does the second, that is worth knowing before you spend anything with anybody.
The commercial job, and the only one that shows up in your pipeline. If the top band is not materially better to call than the second, you have a number rather than a model.
It has to be worth four minutes to the person answering, or nobody finishes and there is nothing to score. This is the job most models are built for and the only one most of them do.
Every weight is a claim about what makes a good customer. Whoever owns the sales number gets to attack those claims before launch, because if they do not, they will attack the leads afterwards.
A model that puts most respondents in the top band is flattering people, and your sales team will know within a fortnight. Thresholds get set against the real distribution, not against a hope.
What is included
How it runs
The stage that decides whether this gets used is the one where somebody tries to break it.
One call with whoever owns the sales number and whoever owns the traffic budget. Ask both to describe the last good lead and the last bad one. The gap between those two accounts is most of the model.
Ends with: the factors, in their words, not ours.
Weights, disqualifiers and provisional bands on one page. It goes to the person most likely to object, because an objection before launch is free and an objection afterwards costs you their cooperation.
Ends with: a marked-up draft and a list of what is contested.
Run your last few dozen enquiries through it on paper. If your best customer from last year scores in the third band, the model is wrong and it is much cheaper to find that out now.
Ends with: the model checked against real outcomes you already know.
A signed model is the thing that stops the qualified argument restarting in month two, because both sides put their name on the definition. Only then does it get built as logic.
Ends with: the model signed, and handed to the build.
No week count is printed here, because none is fixed yet. What sets the pace is getting both sides of the argument in the same hour, which in most businesses is the hardest hour to arrange and the one that returns the most.
The four stages of the whole engagementWhat changes upstream
Cost per lead stops being the number that decides your budget, because the leads stop being interchangeable.
Before the model
Every channel reports leads and a cost. The cheapest channel wins the budget argument, whether or not anything from it ever closed, because nothing in the reporting distinguishes one lead from another.
After it
Every channel reports a band distribution. You can see which campaign brings people who fit and which brings volume, and move money accordingly, months before anything has had time to close.
Packages
There is no package that skips this, because an instrument without a model is a set of questions with a total attached. What grows across the three is the routing: one band going to a calendar, or four bands each with their own pages, sequences, owners and review rule.
Prices go on the pricing page as numbers once they are fixed. Until then the scope is the honest part, and the scope is above.
Where this matters most
Objections
Usually they ignore them because the score was built from behaviour nobody trusts. Opened an email, visited the pricing page twice, sat through a webinar. None of that says whether a business fits, and your sales team knows it, so the number gets overruled and then ignored.
This model scores what somebody told you about themselves: size, timing, authority, and the specific problem you solve. And it is agreed with the person who owns the sales number before anything is built, which is the part that decides whether it gets used.
Your turn
Ours scores your funnel on the four things that decide whether paid traffic turns into pipeline, and puts you in a band with the reasoning attached.
Not open yet. The score and the report are yours whether or not we ever speak.