How to Find and Attract Better Clients Using a Prospect Scorecard

For years, my worst enemy was lurking right in my own business: vagueness.

As a B2B business owner, I’m specifically talking about vagueness in terms of prospect management. It wasn’t unusual to find myself on the fence about a particular prospect, or sense that the “vibes were off,” but I couldn’t always articulate why.

So, I put pen to paper and wrote a prospect scorecard. It’s a list of criteria I use to separate A-grade clients from B-grade clients from F-grade clients. It’s saved me a ton of time and energy, and I encourage my B2B clients to create their own.

Let’s talk about how a prospect scorecard can help your business identify best-fit buyers.

Why You Need a Prospect Scorecard

A prospect scorecard is a linchpin with a trickle-down effect throughout your entire company. Ultimately, a business without a prospect scorecard (which, for many years, was my own) suffers from:

Poor use of resources. Without well-defined prospect criteria, a business typically ends up wasting time and resources pursuing potential customers who aren’t a good fit.

Ineffective marketing and sales efforts. Without clear prospect criteria, a business can struggle to create marketing and sales messages that resonate with potential customers, leading to low conversion rates.

Misaligned business goals and objectives. Without a prospect scorecard, a business’s goals and objectives may not align with the needs and preferences of its potential customers.

Limited growth and revenue. A business that struggles to identify and engage with the right potential customers may miss out on opportunities to sell their products and services to a larger and more diverse customer base.

An inability to compete effectively. A business with vague or no target prospect criteria can find it difficult to differentiate themselves from others in their industry and stand out in a crowded marketplace.

How to Identify Key Criteria for Evaluating Potential Customers

This brings us to a practical exercise: developing a prospect scorecard that’ll weed out prospects who aren’t a great fit so you can spend more time on the ones who are.

At the end of this exercise, you should walk away with a simple top-10 list of target client criteria you can use alongside your target buyer persona, sales processes, and marketing campaigns. (Check out our Fluxe Marketing Scorecard for help with clarifying your marketing approach.)

To be clear, a prospect scorecard shouldn’t replace processes you already have. Rather, it’s a good starting point to help sharpen your focus by simplifying the prospect management process.

When you finish this exercise, these two things should be true:?

• Your list isn’t longer than 10 criteria. You’ll probably have more, but the goal is to force you to prioritize.
• The criteria are polarizing and answered with a yes or a no. Your goal is to make it easy for you to quickly grade your prospects.

You’ll come away with a list of what’s working today, but keep in mind that this list will evolve as you grow. Don’t pressure yourself to make it perfect — perfect is the enemy of done.

Find Your Prospect Scorecard Criteria

Not sure where to start? Past and current clients are your best resources.

Consider your best clients. What traits do they have in common??Do they pay on time? Answer emails promptly? Respect your team?

Now do the same for your worst clients. What do they have in common? What do you know absolutely won’t work?

Below are some examples of the types of criteria you might include on your prospect scorecard:

• Size of their business
• Geographic location
• Industry or sector
• Decision-making process and stakeholders
• How long they’ve been in business
• Minimum budget they have for your services
• Direct access to the decision maker
• Structured to support working with you (e.g., they have a documented sales process and account managers in place)
• Sense of humor and respect for your team

The Scoring System

Once you determine the top 10 criteria for your prospect scorecard, you can create a scoring system. Here’s how ours looks (and yes, it’s ridiculously simple):

• If a prospect meets 8–10 criteria, they’re an A.
• If a prospect meets 5–7 criteria, they’re a B — still aligned with company values, but not as much of a priority as an A.
• Anything below a 4 isn’t worth your time.

You may also weight certain criteria over others, which is completely fine. For example, if a client isn’t a good culture fit for us, we know without looking at anything else that they won’t be a good fit overall.

This system works for us, but everyone’s different. Your criteria will be unique to your business, and only you can determine where prospects fall on the scale.

Put Your Prospect Scorecard to Work

The last step in creating a prospect scorecard is to just start using it!?

Share the scorecard with your team and get them involved, especially anyone with a hand in client management. Help them understand the why behind the scorecard and how to evaluate prospects according to the criteria.

The sooner you start using your prospect scorecard, the sooner you focus your efforts on best-fit clients. The best time to create a prospect scorecard is yesterday — but the second best time is right now!

Kill Vagueness With Your Prospect Scorecard Now

Once you implement your prospect scorecard, you may find that the F-grade prospects severely outnumber the A-grade ones.

If you’re struggling to find high-value clients, there may be an issue with your messaging — the face you present to the internet. This is where content marketing can help.

If you’re interested in attracting prospects you actually want to work with, get in touch. I’d love to see what I can do for your business.