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What is lead scoring and how it can transform your business

In the competitive world of sales and marketing, understanding which leads to prioritize can mean the difference between success and missed opportunities. This is where lead scoring comes into play. By evaluating and ranking leads based on their potential value to your business, lead scoring allows you to focus your efforts on the prospects most likely to convert. In this article, we’ll explore what lead scoring entails, its essential components, and the steps required to implement an effective lead scoring system.

What is lead scoring?

Lead scoring is the process of assigning a numerical value, or score, to leads based on specific criteria that indicate their likelihood to convert into customers. These scores help businesses prioritize their sales and marketing efforts by identifying high-value prospects. The scoring criteria typically include factors such as:

• Demographics: Age, industry, company size, or job title.

• Engagement levels and frequency: Website visits, email interactions, social engagement, or content downloads.

By combining these data points, businesses can create a clear picture of their most promising leads and allocate resources more effectively.

The building blocks of lead scoring

To implement lead scoring successfully, it’s crucial to establish a solid foundation. Here are the steps involved in building an accurate and effective lead scoring system:

1. Conduct data enrichment

Accurate lead scoring begins with reliable data. Data enrichment ensures that your lead information is comprehensive and up-to-date. By augmenting your CRM data with additional insights, you can build a more precise ICP scoring model. This step is critical to understanding the full context of each lead’s potential. For more details, visit our page on Data Enrichment.

2. Define your ideal customer profile (ICP)

Before you can score leads, you need to understand who your ideal customers are. This involves creating an ICP scoring model, which evaluates leads based on how closely they match your target audience. Factors such as company size, industry, location, and revenue are typically considered. To learn more about this process, check out our guide to ICP Tracking.

3. Measure engagement scoring

Engagement tracking is essential to gauge a lead’s interest in your products or services. Engagement scoring evaluates actions such as email opens, clicks, webinar attendance, and social media interactions. By integrating analytics tools with your website, you can monitor these behaviors in real-time. Dive deeper into this topic with our Engagement Tracking guide.

4. Develop your lead scoring model

With enriched data, ICP scoring, and engagement metrics in place, you’re ready to create a comprehensive lead scoring model. This model combines all relevant criteria to assign each lead a score that reflects their potential value. High-scoring leads represent your top prospects, enabling your sales team to focus their efforts where they’re most likely to yield results. If your ICP and engagement scores are standardized (i.e., 0-50), then you can just add your ICP score and engagement scores together to calculate your lead score. 

Creating the engagement score

Let’s start by creating a custom property for engagement score. This score will help you track how actively a lead is engaging with your business.

Here’s a breakdown of how to assign points for engagement:

After setting this up, HubSpot will automatically assign an engagement score to every contact based on their actions. To visualize this data, create a bar chart report that shows the engagement score distribution. This helps you identify the most engaged leads and determine your “perfect engagement score”—the benchmark for 100% engagement.

Now, create a custom contact property called Adjusted engagement score. This property scales the engagement score to a maximum of 50 points. Here’s the formula:
(Engagement score / Perfect engagement score) * 50

Contacts with the perfect engagement score will get a full 50 points, while less-engaged leads will receive proportionally lower scores.

Engagement level property

Next, you’ll want to categorize contacts based on their engagement. Create an engagement level property with dropdown options like:

• Unengaged (0 points)
• Least engaged (1-10 points)
• Slightly engaged (10-20 points)
• Moderately engaged (20-30 points)
• Engaged (30-40 points)
• Most engaged (40+ points)

This makes it easier to report on and segment your contacts by engagement level.

Workflow tip: Use a workflow to automatically assign each contact to the appropriate engagement level based on their adjusted engagement score.

Effective lead scoring doesn’t happen in isolation. It requires a comprehensive approach that includes ICP scoring, data enrichment, and engagement tracking. At CRM Magnetics, we provide the tools and expertise you need to implement a lead scoring system tailored to your business needs. Start your journey towards smarter lead prioritization and improved sales performance today.

Creating the ICP score

Now, let’s focus on how well your leads fit your ICP. The ICP score helps identify contacts that are most aligned with your target audience.

To start, you’ll need accurate data. This might mean enriching your data with tools like Clearbit, Apollo or ZoomInfo to fill in key details like job title, industry, and revenue. Commonly enriched contact and company fields include:

For example, a VP of Sales at a software company with $5 million in revenue could score higher than a mid-level manager at a smaller firm.

Set up a custom ICP score property in HubSpot and assign points based on these criteria. Like the engagement score, the ICP score can range from 0 to 50.

Combining engagement and ICP scores for the HubSpot score

Now that you have both an engagement score and an ICP score, it’s time to combine them. The HubSpot score should be the sum of these two scores, maxing out at 100 points (50 points each for engagement and ICP).

By using both engagement and fit, you’ll get a more balanced and accurate picture of your leads, making it easier for your sales team to focus on the best opportunities.

Why your business needs lead scoring

Implementing lead scoring offers numerous benefits for businesses, including:

• Improved efficiency: Sales teams can focus on high-value leads, saving time and resources.

• Higher conversion rates: By targeting the right prospects, businesses can improve their chances of closing deals.

• Enhanced marketing ROI: Tailoring campaigns to engage top-scoring leads ensures better use of marketing budgets.