🧞♂️ New to Exponential Scale? Each week, I provide tools, tips, and tricks for tiny teams with big ambitions that want to scale big. For more: Exponential Scale Podcast | Scalebrate | Scalebrate Hub
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In today's newsletter:
Latest Podcasts: What You Missed
Want to Scale? ICP: Do You Know Me? – If your business feels busy but not scalable, this episode shows how a fuzzy ICP quietly kills leverage, margins, and momentum and how dialing it in changes everything.
The 10 Money Skills Every Microteam Should Master - You’re great at what you do. But if the money side of your business feels confusing, stressful, or weirdly fragile, this episode is required listening.
What Can You Learn from 22 Microteam Success Stories? (…Plus 1) - Real microteams, real results, and the repeatable patterns behind outsized growth with tiny teams… and one notable failure.
Interview with Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier - How Zapier scaled with leverage, automation, and focus instead of hiring and organizational bloat.
Automate Lead Scoring and CRM Updates
Your CRM is supposed to make sales easier. Instead, it's a data entry nightmare.
Every lead comes in. You manually enter their info. Then you manually score them ("Is this a good fit?"). Then you manually update the status. Then you manually assign them to a rep.
By the time you're done with admin work, you've spent 30 minutes on a lead you haven't even talked to yet.
Meanwhile, hot leads go cold because they're sitting in a queue, unsorted, while you're stuck updating fields in Salesforce.
There's a better way: Automate lead scoring and CRM updates so your team only touches qualified, ready-to-convert leads.
Why Manual Lead Scoring Kills Microteams
Big sales teams can afford to have SDRs who do nothing but qualify leads all day.
Microteams can't.
When you have 2-3 salespeople, every hour spent on admin is an hour not spent closing deals.
And manual lead scoring has two massive problems:
Problem #1: It's Slow
By the time you manually review a lead, score them, and assign them, hours have passed. Maybe a full day.
In B2B, speed matters. Studies show that leads contacted within 5 minutes are 100x more likely to convert than leads contacted after an hour.
If you're manually scoring leads, you're losing that window.
Problem #2: It's Inconsistent
When humans score leads, everyone has a different definition of "qualified."
One rep thinks a 50-person company is a good fit. Another thinks you need 200+ employees. One rep loves leads from tech companies. Another avoids them.
Result: Leads get scored differently depending on who reviews them. Your data is messy. Your reports are useless.
Automation fixes both problems. Leads get scored instantly and consistently, every single time.
The Automated Lead Scoring Framework
Here's how to automate lead scoring and CRM updates so your sales team can focus on selling: