I am extremely frustrated by how limited/inflexible/underpowered Hubspot’s lead scoring capabilities are. I think of lead scoring as an accumulative/progressive methodology for quantifying engagement, in which lead score increases can be incrementally triggered each time leads complete new actions (and pretty much any action, down to the level of a data value being changed, should be available for scoring). Thinking about lead scoring in these terms allows a user to build an extremely granular model that maps to their unique business needs.
Hubspot, on the other hand, seems to have conceived of lead scoring as some kind of retrospective look-back on the state of the Hubspot contact database (which is odd, considering that lead score increases/decreases are not given line items in a contact’s activity history -- crazy). I can’t trigger a lead score update every time a lead clicks through an email -- but I can assign a lead a point if “number of emails clicked = 1” ?
Another thing (which is the case elsewhere in Hubspot, too): once you’ve added more than ~10 lead scoring attributes, the UI itself becomes incredibly unwiedly. There’s no way to organize or add any hierarchy; all of your scoring attributes are just jumbled in there nonsensically.
It’s also a point of frustration that there’s only 1 available “model” for lead scoring in Hubspot. The ability to use a marketing automation platform to increase or decrease point values for custom fields -- beyond just “Lead Score” -- unlocks a lot of powerful additional options for tracking engagement and interest.
Finally, it’s crazy to me that lead scores can’t be reset without either finding a way to jerry-rig negative scoring (which is not what negative scoring should be used for), or deleting lead scoring attributes from the model altogether. There are many, many scenarios for which a lead’s score should be brought back to 0 for continued nurturing (here are two really obvious ones: 1) a rep sets the status to “Recycle” 2) the lead becomes a customer and now we want to nurture them towards an upsell).
I am a recent adoptee of Hubspot and have mostly been satisfied with it thus far. But this is an enormous, glaring problem for sure.
I could not agree more. Having set up and managed pardot & marketo, their lead scoring system blows HS’s (hubspot) out of the water.
If this isn’t the product teams number 1 priority then there are larger issues here. Lead scoring is the foundation of marketing automation system. If the scoring isn’t done right, then why are you putting effort into all the marketing channels if they can’t be scored properly?
Pardot is nice because it gives you the generic ones right out of the box. In HS you can’t even add a generic everytime a unique email is opened give “x” amount of point. **bleep**?! OR everytime a webpage is viewed give 2pts, so it compounds ie someone who visits 5 pages will have a score of 10 while someone who visits 1 will have a score of 2pts. 10 is way warmer than 2.
Hubspot get your ish together (this among other reason is why I am questioning my decision but I’ve already sold my stock in y’all).
Get the basics right!!! your competitors (Marketo & Pardot) already have.
Also allow for the lead score to be a one time or a recurring score. I’d like to be able to up the score each time someone downloads a report. Or each time they come to the website.
I wish I could up vote this more. Right now Act-on allows you to have the ability to have multiple lead scoring models for differnt job roles. In Marketo they did Behavior and Demogrpahic seperately and it was cumlative non of this minus 20 points if they have done this. Also to abowman3d point the fact that we can;t reset their score is frustrating because we reclyce and then requalify the leads. Sometimes people are interested but not ready to speak to sales.
Let me add my echo to all the comments on this thread. I say this as someone who is a big fan of Hubspot. Generally speaking, Hubspot’s UI is clean and intuitive, and your support team is first-rate. But your scoring system is a ridiculous joke, and it should be an embarrassment to your product team. I can’t imagine why no changes have been made to the scoring system when this one idea alone has four pages of excellent comments over the last year. I personally have thought about adding my ideas many times, but never got around to it. Now I need to do a major update on our scoring, and I know it is going to be incredibly painful. So I’ll add my comment now, in hopes that maybe my voice can be the “Yop!” that finally puts it over the top. (Horton Hears a Who reference).
In addition to the other comments made in this thread, the scoring system could be vastly improved by just changing the UI to allow you to collapse, group, filter and search sets. I should be able to easily see just the scores based on CTA clicks, for example, or form submits, page views, etc. with a filter. I think it would also be great to be able to filter by point level as well, e.g. let me see all the sets that score between 5-20. I won’t try to list all the ways these can be sliced and diced, but it should be pretty obvious. It would be based on the criteria we use to set them up.
Also, we should be able to create folders just like we do with lists, and group score sets under folders. And rather than having to scroll through an interminable list of blocks that contain all the settings for every filter, we should be able to see a collapsed list of the filters with key data in columns, like name, type (CTA, form, page view, etc.) and points scored. Then we can drill into any given score set if we want to make changes.
It’s too late for me, because I am going to have to do a major overhaul with this abominable system, but for the sake of future generations, PLEASE FIX THIS THING!!!
Lead scoring is the weakest feature in Hubspot, yet one of the most important requirements to get marketing automation right. Please give it a complete overhaul.
Hi HubSpot Community - thank you all for providing your feedback on this issue. I’m a member of our Product team and I wanted to let you all know that we hope to make significant improvements to scoring in the coming months! Please continue to provide examples and use-cases on this issue, I will provide an update once additional functionality is closer to beta.
This is exciting news as we have differnt journeys we want to take per persona and also our buyers journey vs our customer journey. Right now we have to use the lead scoring model for net new MQLs and made a frankinstien version using lists and workflows for our re-qualifed MQLs. Also for our ABM accounts we have had to use workflows and lists. If there could be a partnership with companies like Bombora for intent signals that would be a huge bonus as well here as I would love to combine predicitve scoring + behavior + demogrpahic
(I posted this early this year as it’s own topic, not sure if it ever was addressed, but adding here since this seems to be the thread product team is looking at.)
It seems that if there is no company data (i.e. can’t find the domain or name I am guessing), rather than the database disregarding the field, it will put a zero for the number of employees.
e.g.
I want to score a contact based on the size of the company.
If the company name (or domain) entered in a form does not exactly match the database then it obviously can’t find the company - makes sense. I have had cases where it’s a subsidiary, company was acquired and they are on an old domain etc. Lots of cases where this could happen.
However, it will then insert a 0 as company size, and for my purposes essentially throw the lead out as I have a negative score if a company is under a certain size.
This makes being able to use this data as useless for lead scoring.
What needs to happen is if there is no data, it just doesn’t score it at all and not give it a zero and cause a negative score to kick in.
One nice feature would also to be able to create a list of prospects whose score has increased the most over a period of time. This allows you to identify the most active prospects.
We would just need to have a filter on “lead scoring” for “increase in score”
Lead scoring should be able to work off of calculations.
Taking an example, I should be able to say “For each email open 2 points” rather than having to hardcode "email opens = 1, then 2 points… email opens = 2 then 4 points… etc)
When we engaged with our Hubspot CSM about a year ago, she mentioned that they intended the Hubspot scoring model to be a relative scoring model that is always out of 100 points, and to have specific actions that would qualify a lead… rather than using the Hubspot score itself to qualify.
As an example you can set ranges where 1-3 email clicks = 5 points, 3-6 email clicks = 10 points, etc. You can also set time decay logic to your scoring rules where the score decreases the longer they don’t interact with Marketing material.
The score under this model would basically just be a data point for your Sales team, rather than something you could use to qualify leads. Instead you would have to have specific call-to-actions that qualify Leads regardless of their score, I.E. when they fill out a form.
It’s personally not how I would envision a scoring model, especially after using other marketing automation systems such as Pardot or Marketo, but this might be helpful for folks trying to work with Hubspot. This also doesn’t help with other obvious painpoints, such as creating duplicate scoring rules for multiple email clicks.
I really hope Hubspot is still reconsidering their approach to scoring, but hopefully this information might help you all out in the meantime.
We are quite a large user when is comes to lead scoring and we are close to outgrowing hubspot capabilities, and staying within the total recommended lead scoring rules.
For example:
Our ideal scenario would be to setup generic CTA with a score of say 10 points.
Then use this same CTA across 10 different campaigns
If the contact clicks all 10 we would like their score to be 100 points.
At the moment to achieve this we would need to setup 10 different rules.
If there can be a ‘Multi-score’ option per rule that would be very good