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How Do Your Sales Leads Measure Up? Here are a few ways to check the effectiveness of online business generation by developing a lead-scoring model.

By Mikal E. Belicove

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Your online marketing efforts may be helping you rack up a lot of leads--but how do you know if all that work is bringing in the right kind of potential customers?

For that, you need a lead-scoring model. Lead scoring ranks leads generated from your website according to their purchase readiness. The exercise helps you move purchase-ready visitors to the front of the line and resource-wasting window shoppers to the back.

A lead-scoring model is a set of weighted criteria--characteristics of a purchase-ready website visitor are weighted according to how important each characteristic is. The idea is to use the characteristics of your best customers to find more customers like them.