Lead scoring is much more than just a marketing strategy.  

It can make your entire business stronger and align many different teams in your business. If deployed strategically, lead scoring can produce several positive outcomes: 

• Faster Follow-Ups 
• More Compelling Marketing Campaigns 
• Sales and Marketing Alignment 

However, lead scoring doesn't come with a one-size-fits-all framework — every organization needs to build its own scoring model that reflects its goals, objectives, and targets. 

Thankfully, HubSpot's software suite does include tools for easily evaluating lead quality in terms of "fit", allowing your sales team to tactically interact with the most prepared, sales-ready leads. 

Even so, there are still many users who stumble when trying to harness HubSpot's lead-scoring functionality to its fullest potential. Here are some proven tips to help you navigate it successfully. 

1. Determine an SQL Threshold  

A threshold marks the moment when a lead is deemed ready for sales engagement, signaling the go-ahead for your sales team to step in. 

Setting the threshold too low means risking unprepared leads reaching your sales reps, resulting in fewer deals closed and higher costs as they chase unproductive leads. On the other hand, setting it too high risks losing valuable leads to competitors. 

Finding the perfect lead scoring threshold demands plenty of data, time, and insights from your sales team and loyal customers. Despite our best efforts, achieving perfection in lead scoring remains a challenge. Simply collecting lead-scoring data without acting on it serves no purpose. The threshold is your cue to act. 

2. Define Personas & Customer Profiles 

A buyer persona is a fictional research-based profile that depicts a target customer, describing who they are, what their days are like, the challenges they face, and how they make decisions. Crafting detailed personas and customer profiles is what empowers your marketing team to flag leads that match those descriptions. 

Then, your sales and marketing teams assign scores to target audiences, refining them as prospects engage with tailored campaigns or content, which signals hot leads for your sales team. Assessing scores based on demographic data is crucial for identifying marketing qualified leads (MQLs). Some examples of buyer persona and customer profile data for scoring include: 

• Job title/role 
• Department 
• Industry 
• Company (particularly useful for targeted ABM campaigns) 
• Annual revenue 
• Location (state, region, or country) 

3. DEVELOP A SCORING SYSTEM FOR DIFFERENT ACTIONS

Behavioral scoring means assessing leads when they demonstrate interest in your product or service through their actions. For instance, visiting a product page signals some level of interest in what you offer. It's important to assign a score for such actions, although the exact value depends on your scoring model. 

Common behavioral actions that marketers assign scores for include: 

• Email opens, clicks, and forwards 
• Website visits 
• Social media engagement 
• Contact requests 
• Content downloads 
• Contact form submissions 
• Free trials 
• Product demos 

Behavioral scoring typically constitutes the bulk of a lead's score. While they can only be scored once based on their demographic information, they can earn points each time they engage with your content or offerings. This implies that behavioral actions often contribute more points than demographic factors. 

4. AUTOMATE Lead Scoring Using Your CRM 

Ideally, your business's marketing automation system tracks and scores a prospect's behavior and integrates with your CRM database. This way, your sales reps can easily view leads' activity on their contact record and understand the actions or campaigns they engaged with. The data flow between your tools is key when a sales rep is reaching out to a prospect. 

HubSpot offers automated lead-scoring solutions within its suite, eliminating the hassle of manually consolidating, analyzing, and prioritizing leads. By utilizing data points from the entire customer journey to analyze and score each lead, your reps can ensure every lead is adequately qualified, leveraging up to 25 different scoring systems for a customized approach. The end outcome? Close more deals with data-backed prioritization and perfectly timed follow-ups. 

5. Incorporate Negative Scores 

Not all actions a prospect takes are necessarily positive, and you need to account for that in your lead scoring model. Certain actions either indicate that the lead is not a good fit, or that they are not interested. For these actions, you should award negative points, pushing them further from qualification, so they don't end up wasting your sales reps' time.  

Actions that could receive a negative score include:  

• Email bounces 
• Unsubscribing from your email list  
• Criticizing your brand on social media  
• Visiting your jobs page (indicating they are job searching, not looking to buy your product) 

There will inevitably be leads that simply won't convert into customers – it's a reality all sales teams face. That's why it's perfectly fine to use your lead scoring tools to automatically disqualify such leads. You don't want to waste valuable marketing efforts on leads that are unlikely to convert. 

Pro Tip 💡Consider implementing a "point decay" system as well. This means subtracting points from leads who are gradually becoming less engaged. For instance, if a lead hasn't opened an email or visited your website in three months, deducting ten points from their score makes sense. Then, for each subsequent month of inactivity, deducting five more points keeps your scoring reflective of their diminishing engagement. 

6. talk to Your Customers 

Engaging in conversations with your customers isn't just about building rapport – it's also a goldmine for refining your lead-scoring process. They can provide firsthand insights into what really matters to them, delivering critical information that helps you fine-tune your lead scoring criteria. 

By understanding the factors that influence their decision-making process, your team can better identify those hot leads and ensure they get the attention they deserve. Plus, hearing directly from your customers allows you to capture nuances that may not be evident from data alone. So, keep those conversations flowing – because each chat brings you one step closer to closing those deals. 

master LEAD SCORING WITH HUBSPOT

Lead scoring allows your team to work smarter when it comes to pursuing prospects and using marketing automation tools for sales. Focusing solely on high-quality leads likely to convert saves you the time and frustration that comes from trying to reach and convert prospects that just aren’t ready, and maybe never will be. But remember, a lead scoring model requires some maintenance. If it seems like your leads are being over- or under-valued, you will need to evaluate your customer data to see if your model needs to be adjusted. This is where HubSpot can help with its predictive lead scoring software. 

Whether you’re looking to adopt HubSpot and begin implementing lead scoring or have an existing HubSpot account and just want to calibrate your lead scoring model, contact us - our team is ready to help you fully harness  HubSpot's lead scoring system.

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