Lead scoring answers one question: of everyone we are talking to, who is worth today?
A rep gets 50 new leads a day and calls all 50. Most are poor fits. One buys. That is a week spent for a single deal, and it is what happens without scoring.
What lead scoring is
A system that ranks prospects by how likely they are to buy. Each one carries a score, usually 0–100. High scores get called today. Low scores wait.
Four things feed it.
- Fit: do they match your ideal customer profile, by company size, industry and budget?
- Engagement: are they actually interested, judging by email opens, site visits and demo requests?
- Timing: are they ready now, for instance asking about pricing?
- Authority: can this person actually sign?
It turns a hunch into a number. Instead of a rep saying a prospect feels hot, there is a figure that says so and a reason behind it.
What it changes
A rep works 10 good leads instead of 50 cold ones, and the win rate moves with them. Your close rate on 80+ leads might be 40%, against 5% on leads below 40.
The cycle also shortens, because a high score tells the rep to call now rather than next week. Marketing and sales stop arguing about lead quality, because the criteria are written down.
Scoring the profile
These are facts about the company and the person. You can score them before anyone engages.
- Company size: if you sell to 100+ person companies, a 10-person startup scores 0 here
- Industry: tech +20, other 0
- Budget: enterprise +30, mid-market +20, startup +5
- Location: US +10, Europe +5, elsewhere 0
- Role: CFO +30, coordinator +5
Scoring the behavior
These are the actions that signal genuine interest.
- Website visits: pricing page +5, product page +10, comparison page +20
- Email: opened +2, clicked a link +5
- Demo request: +50, and the strongest signal you will get
- Whitepaper download: +10
- Social: liked a LinkedIn post +1, commented +3, messaged you +10
- Sales interaction: replied to a cold email +15, took a call +50
- Frequency: engaged 3 or more times in a month +20
Building your model
Start with your best customers and find what they share. You might find they are tech companies of 50–500 people, in the US, with at least $1M in annual revenue, who bought within 30 days of first contact. Those traits become your high-scoring attributes.
Then set bands, so a score means something to whoever reads it.
- 0–20: cold. Poor fit, no engagement.
- 21–49: warm. Some fit. Worth an email.
- 50–79: hot. Good fit and engaged. Call them.
- 80+: drop what you are doing.
Scores should move as people engage. A prospect arrives on day 1 at 35, on fit alone. By day 3 they have opened 2 emails, so 45. By day 5 they have visited the demo page 3 times, so 65. On day 7 they request a demo and it jumps to 85. That last jump is the moment to call.
Fit and behavior together
Fit scoring is easy to run and works before anyone engages. It tells you nothing about interest, and it produces confident false positives: the right company, the wrong person.
Behavior scoring shows real interest and tracks closely with buying. It needs tracking in place, and it misses the interested prospect who has not clicked anything yet.
Use both. A lead is worth dropping everything for when it scores high on fit and on behavior at the same time.
A worked example
An inbound lead downloads a whitepaper. It is a 50-person startup in Portland, so fit scores 10: smaller than you would like, right in most other respects. The download adds 15. Total 25.
That is not a call today. Add them to a nurture sequence and look again in 2 weeks. If they come back and visit the pricing page twice, the score crosses 50 and the rep picks up the phone.
Written by the team at Ambivo, a business platform that keeps CRM, accounting and ERP on one customer record. This article is general guidance on the topic rather than a description of Ambivo features.