We see it a lot. Your marketing department hands off leads that aren't ready for your sales team, and it causes tension within your company. You sometimes feel like you're wasting your sales team's time by passing off leads that aren't ready to buy.
But at the same time, how do you actually know which of your prospects are genuinely ready to discuss with a sales representative and which are still in the beginning stages of the buyer's journey? We've found that businesses have been successful in using effective lead scoring and tapping into HubSpot, which has recently enhanced its capabilities to make this process more precise than ever.
Lead Scoring Foundations
Lead scoring is the automated process of qualifying your company's leads as SQLs or MQLs based on their characteristics and how they interact with your website, marketing campaigns, and other content.
Through this systematic approach, you create a framework that assigns point values to crucial pieces of criteria, properties, and behavioral actions that contacts take within your CRM. As prospects interact with your company, they accumulate positive and negative points, eventually reaching thresholds indicating their sales-readiness.
HubSpot's Enhanced Scoring Framework
The evolution of HubSpot's scoring capabilities has significantly improved how businesses can evaluate and qualify leads. Let's explore each enhanced leading scoring tool component and understand how they work together to create a more comprehensive lead qualification system.
The Traditional Score Property: Your Foundation
While HubSpot has introduced new scoring capabilities, the traditional score property remains a valuable foundation for lead qualification. This system is the bedrock of lead scoring, allowing you to create custom criteria based on your business needs. We work to assign positive and negative points to various actions and attributes, tracking cumulative lead engagement. The flexibility of this system means you can adjust and fine-tune your scoring criteria as your understanding of your ideal customer evolves.
Understanding the New Engagement Score
HubSpot's new Engagement Score represents a significant advancement in tracking and evaluating lead interaction. This automated system continuously monitors how contacts engage with your marketing assets, including emails, website pages, and forms. This feature's built-in score decay functionality makes this feature particularly powerful, which ensures that engagement scores remain current and relevant. As time passes, the weight of older interactions naturally diminishes, providing a more accurate picture of current interest levels.
For example, if a prospect downloaded a whitepaper three months ago but hasn't engaged since, their engagement score will reflect this declining activity. Conversely, a prospect who has recently attended a webinar and visited your pricing page will show a higher engagement score, helping your sales team prioritize their outreach efforts.
Leveraging the New Fit Score
The Fit Score adds another crucial dimension to lead evaluation by focusing on how well prospects match a specific ideal customer profile (ICP). This score looks beyond simple engagement to assess whether a lead has the characteristics of a potentially successful customer. For Enterprise users, the system employs AI-assisted scoring recommendations, analyzing your existing customer base to identify the most relevant criteria for your business.
The Fit Score evaluates various demographic and other data points, including job titles, industry alignment, and company size. This systematic approach helps identify high-value prospects even if they're not currently showing high engagement levels — particularly valuable for businesses with longer sales cycles where early identification of good-fit prospects is crucial.
Implementing the Company Fit Score
The Company Fit Score takes lead scoring to the account level, making it an essential tool for businesses employing account-based marketing (ABM) strategies. Rather than focusing on individual contacts, this score evaluates entire organizations based on company-wide criteria. This approach is particularly valuable for B2B companies where multiple stakeholders are typically involved in the purchasing decision. We've also seen this helpful, especially when enterprise businesses are integrating multiple systems into HubSpot. This is because they can track overall company scores rather than multiple contacts at one company. This may lead to multiple individuals being worked by different reps, causing internal miscommunication and misalignment.
Understanding Score Properties and Thresholds
When you implement lead scoring in HubSpot, each score type creates its property in your CRM. These properties store and track the values for both contacts and companies. When activated, the system evaluates leads retroactively, examining their historical interactions and property values to establish initial scores. From there, scores update continuously as contacts and companies meet your defined criteria.
Score Properties and Management
For most score types, HubSpot creates a single property to track values. However, for Enterprise users implementing combined scores, the system generates three distinct properties: a total score combining engagement and fit points, an engagement score, and a fit score. This granular approach allows you to track overall lead quality and specific aspects of lead behavior.
Think about a business offering multiple services — you might create separate engagement scores for each service line, allowing you to track and qualify leads based on their interest in specific offerings. These separate properties can then be used in views, lists, workflows, and reports to segment and target leads effectively.
Understanding Score Thresholds
HubSpot's scoring system includes customizable thresholds that categorize leads using color-coded labels. For engagement and fit scores, leads fall into three categories: High, Medium, and Low. An example of points you may assign to these would be 70-100, 40-69, and 0-39, but you can edit them to match your company's needs. These thresholds help teams quickly identify and prioritize promising leads.
Enterprise users working with combined scores benefit from a more sophisticated A1-C3 classification system. This matrix combines fit (A-C) and engagement (1-3) scores, where:
- '"A" indicates high fit, "B" medium fit, and "C" low fit
- "1" represents high engagement, "2" medium engagement, and "3" low engagement
For example, a C1 score would indicate a lead with low fit but high engagement – perhaps a small business showing strong interest in an enterprise solution.
Maintaining Score Accuracy
When you update scoring criteria, HubSpot automatically re-evaluates all contacts and companies, adjusting their scores based on your changes. This impacts any tools using these scores, such as:
- List segmentation
- Workflow automation
- Reports and analytics
- View filters
HubSpot provides detailed performance analytics for Enterprise users, allowing you to track score distribution and effectiveness over time through record history cards and comprehensive reporting tools.
What We Recommend You Should Score
A comprehensive lead-scoring strategy considers multiple data points and interactions. Understanding what to score and why is crucial for creating an effective system that accurately reflects lead quality.
Contact Information
Form submissions provide vital information for lead scoring, and how prospects fill out these forms can indicate their level of interest. Most forms require basic fields like name and email, but including optional fields like phone numbers or budget information provides additional opportunities for scoring. A prospect who takes the time to complete optional fields often demonstrates higher intent than one who provides only the minimum required information.
Also, consider the quality of the information provided. Valid business email addresses should score higher than generic ones, and complete, accurate information should earn more points than partial or questionable data.
Job Type and Seniority
In B2B environments, a prospect's role within their organization can significantly impact their value as a lead. Decision-makers like directors or C-level executives typically warrant higher scores than individual contributors, though this should be calibrated based on your specific sales process and target market.
The prospect's department and functional role matter, too. For example, if you sell marketing software, a Marketing Director might score higher than a Finance Director, even at the same seniority level. Consider creating a hierarchy of roles and departments that aligns with your ideal customer profile.
Location Relevance
Geographic location can be crucial in lead scoring, particularly for businesses with defined service areas or region-specific offerings. Leads from your target markets should receive positive scores, while those from regions where you don't operate might warrant negative scores. This helps your sales team focus on leads they can serve while avoiding wasted effort on those outside your service area.
Website Engagement
User behavior on your website provides valuable insights into a prospect's interests and intent. Visits to high-value pages like pricing, product specifications, or case studies typically indicate stronger buying intent than visits to general blog posts or company information pages.
The frequency and recency of visits matter, too. A prospect who views your pricing page multiple times a week shows more immediate interest than someone who visited once months ago. HubSpot's new engagement scoring features make tracking and weighting these behaviors easier.
Best Practices for Using Multiple Scores
The power of HubSpot's scoring system lies in how you combine and utilize different score types. Understanding how to leverage these scores together can dramatically improve your lead qualification process.
Strategic Score Combinations
The relationship between Engagement and Fit Scores provides crucial insights into lead quality. A prospect with high engagement but low fit scores might seem promising initially, but pursuing them could exhaust valuable resources. For instance, a small business showing high interest in your enterprise-level solution might engage heavily with your content but ultimately lack the budget or infrastructure to become a customer.
Leads scoring high in both categories deserve immediate attention. When prospects match your ideal customer profile and consistently engage with your content, they're typically ready for sales outreach. This combination often indicates a qualified prospect with the means and interest to purchase.
Automated Workflow Strategies
Your scoring system should trigger specific actions based on score combinations. Create workflows that:
- Alert sales representatives when leads reach both engagement and fit score thresholds.
- Automatically assign leads to different nurture tracks based on their score combinations.
- Remove low-fit leads from high-touch marketing campaigns to preserve resources.
- Escalate leads to priority status when their engagement score suddenly increases.
Continuous Evaluation and Refinement
Lead scoring isn't a "set it and forget it" system. Customer behaviors and market conditions evolve, requiring regular assessment and adjustment of your scoring criteria. Implement a quarterly review process that:
- Analyzes conversion rates for different score combinations.
- Gathers feedback from sales on lead quality.
- Adjusts thresholds based on performance data.
- Updates scoring criteria to reflect changes in your ideal customer profile.
- Validates that your scoring aligns with current business goals and market conditions.
How Lead Scoring Empowers Data-Driven Campaigns and Closes Deals Faster
Combining the original HubSpot features of lead scoring with new functionalities like company and engagement scoring, Marketers and Sales leaders are able to tie scoring to what matters: Qualified Leads That Turn Into Opportunities. Some common complementary frameworks used in HubSpot to make the most out of lead scoring are the Lifecycle Stages and/or Lead Status properties. Working with diverse types of businesses, we recommend establishing these stages and statutes to align with your scoring thresholds.
For example, someone who scores high might be passed to Sales via a notification or assignment workflow, but you will also want to tag that person with a Lifecycle Stage as maybe a Sales Working Lead and a Lead Status of New. Based on this, prospects can be enrolled in more specific nurtures or append important information that will help Sales have more informed conversations, tying your entire buyer's journey together with a pretty orange HubSpot bow.
Ready to Transform Your Lead Scoring?
HubSpot's enhanced scoring capabilities provide powerful tools for identifying and prioritizing your best leads. Implementing a comprehensive strategy that combines traditional scoring with new Engagement, Fit, and Company Fit Scores can significantly improve your lead qualification process, but it can be a difficult process and take a certain level of strategic expertise to really get the most out of it.
As a company with tenured HubSpot and Marketing experts, we thrive in taking on unique and specific challenges. Whether you're an MSP with some added ConnectWise complications or a restaurant group using OpenTable to track reservation engagement, we build strategic solutions focused on data driven decisions and insights.
Contact our team to learn how we can help you maximize these tools.
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