Once you've generated leads, the critical next step is prioritizing where and how to invest valuable sales and marketing resources. Chances are the 80/20 rule applies to your organization. That is, 80% of your revenue will ultimately come from 20% of your leads. Ideally, you'll want to focus 80% or more of your resources on cultivating and closing this golden 20%.

How does one achieve this? Test different scoring algorithms. What are the criteria being used? What happens when you adjust the weighting? Are you tracking attributes of deals that close versus those that don't? You may find you have powerful levers at your disposal, which will differ for different products and markets. Some inherently require longer sales cycles, but ultimately pay off with larger-sized deals. Overly simplistic or misweighted lead scoring may be worse than no system at all.

Here are two of my favorite lead-scoring solutions on AppExchange:

• TrueAdvantage. Helps you define sales triggers on prospect activities and behavior that indicate readiness to buy.
• ON24 LeadVantage Transfer. Automates transfer of ON24 webcast attendee and activity information into Salesforce, enabling you to assess lead quality.

What should you do with low-scoring leads? Don't discard them completely. You never know who might come around. The key here is to keep them engaged with less resource-intensive "mass" methods. Perhaps let your rookie sales reps practice on these leads, or try out some new marketing material while saving the most attractive, high-scoring leads for star sales reps and trusted marketing messages. You could create a workflow inside Salesforce to automatically "touch" lukewarm leads every X number of days with different content and offers.

Lead scoring can become very nuanced with multiple channels of engagement. At a high level, these typically include direct sales, inside sales, reseller, and online channels. (btw, once you've figured out your channel objectives, our PRM product is great for implementing your strategy, managing channel partners, preventing channel conflict, etc.) Google, for example, does a great job of segmenting advertisers across channels, cherry-picking high-potential accounts at each tier and targeting these with higher-touch channel engagement. The online channel in particular has really fueled Google's business with impressive results:

1. Meet 100% of demand. An easy-to-use, self-service online channel has enabled Google's AdWords business to grow and scale internationally and into new markets at the pace of customer demand rather than be subject to staffing bottlenecks. The upfront investment in building out the online channel infrastructure and superior user experience has paid for itself many times over. Google admittedly still requires a human touch to edit and approve ad copy, but everything that is automatable has been automated.
2. Reduce cost of sale and capture the long tail. An online channel has near-zero marginal operational cost per additional customer or transaction -- it's all margin. This has enabled online businesses like Google to capture business from the long tail and democratize ad buying. Anyone can buy AdWords -- the local dog walker, a sandwich shop in Dublin, I've even seen personal dating ads.
3. Test before invest. There is no point in having higher-touch channels if you don't have an effective and accurate means for funneling the right leads to the right channels. Starting with the lowest-cost channel like Google did, however, means they were able to take empirical ad spend data to help assign accounts to channels for future upsell, eg have inside sales reps follow up with the top 10% of online channel accounts.

Depending on your business, you may want to score and segment along different dimensions -- past demonstrated spend, estimated potential spend, timing/readiness to buy, to name a few.

Bonus Marketing/Corporate Social Responsibility Tip of the Day
Do good while doing well by donating your product. Not only are you giving back, but you will cultivate a loyal user base in the community who can provide honest product feedback, testimonials and references, and potentially help you enter new markets and deals through their connections. salesforce.com, for example, donates free licenses to over 2200 registered charities, nonprofits, and NGOs including the United Nations World Food Programme, Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts, and United Way.