Best Practice for a Basic Contact Score: What do you include?

[mseibert]

We want to start scoring new contacts right from the beginning when we create new contacts in HubSpot. Often we only have very little info about people.

Do you have suggestions on which criteria for scoring can be used and actually help? 

[mseibert]

I liked especially the "activity-based measures". But HubSpot does not seem to be able to help me use them in scores directly. E.g. in last update you can only define fix dates not relative dates like last 30 days. Although you can use page views all other engagement criteria like (number of notes, number of activities / engagements of any type, ...) is not available natively.

Am I right, that this has to be calculated with automations or via the API and then populated in the contact as a custom field?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @mseibert,

That depends what you want to score them for – I assume a score that measures how qualified they are (intent + fit)?

If you're starting with a small amount of information and you already have a good idea of what fields you would like to have populated (because they're relevant for qualification by sales, for example) then I'd recommend assigning positive values to the fact that these properties are known. These could be fields like Phone number, Number of employees or Buying role. Overall, this heavily depends on your sales process and which kind of information is crucial for sales.

Additionally, if you don't have a lot of information, activity-based measures can be helpful, e.g. Marketing emails opened, Marketing emails clicked, Time last seen, Number of sessions and the fact that they've viewed certain pages (such as a specific product page or the pricing page). Also Number of unique forms submitted. You could also weigh form submissions that are further along the buyer's journey more than awareness content (= more points).

Lastly, if you want to bake in some negative criteria, you could deduct points for freemail addresses (Email domains is equal to any of gmail.com etc.), invalid email addresses (Email hard bounce reason is known) and inactivity (Sends since last engagement is greater than 10).

Hope this helps!