Hello - Advice Needed

[EHagel]

Hi all - My name is Elise and I'm looking for some advice on lead scoring.. We really want to take advantage of lead scoring combinations and be able to accuratley scout this contacts out to push them over to our sales people. Does anyone currently do this or have any advice for me? Thanks!! Excited to learn in this group

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @EHagel,

Happy to help, do you have any specific questions?

To get you started, I would recommend these resources:

• Understand the lead scoring tool: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/scoring/understand-the-lead-scoring-tool
• Understanding HubSpot Lead Scoring: https://academy.hubspot.com/lessons/understanding-hubspot-lead-scoring
• Would Sales Want Them? | Time To Rethink Lead Scoring Before the Sunset: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF5jW-jiU7s

Best regards

[RubenBurdin · Accepted solution]

Hi @EHagel 

Lead scoring gets really impactful when you go beyond the basics and start combining different data points creatively.

A few approaches you might consider:

• Behavioral + Demographic Mix: Instead of just giving points for “visited a pricing page” or “opened an email,” try combining them. For example: a contact who works at a company over 200 employees and has visited your case study page twice could be scored higher than each action alone.
• Engagement Patterns: Look for sequences, not just isolated actions. Someone who downloads an ebook and then signs up for a webinar in the same week shows intent worth more than those actions separately
• Negative Scoring: Don’t forget to subtract points for disengagement (like no opens in 60 days) or unfit criteria (like students if you only sell B2B). It keeps the pipeline clean.
• Creative Triggers: Use signals outside the obvious. Did they interact with your chatbot? Did they share your content on LinkedIn? Even small signals like returning to your site at unusual hours can sometimes highlight urgency or buying intentt
• Sales Alignment: The most important part is to test your scoring with Sales. Ask them: “Would you want to talk to this person?” Their feedback will help you refine the weight of each action.

Sometimes it helps to run a pilot model for a month, see which leads converted to opportunities, and then fine-tune the scoring weights based on that real data.

[Muyambo · Accepted solution]

Hey @EHagel, 

Hopefully you find this useful! 

Our lead scoring process usually begins by defining an ideal customer profile (ICP) with the sales team - best advice I can give here is to analyse your best customers to identify shared traits.

Next, choose key behaviours to track from those best customers, like visiting pricing or product pages, downloading content or attending webinars, and assign fair positive and negative scores (core advice is don’t go crazy with the scores as tempting as it might be ha!)

Then set clear thresholds (for example, 0–20 subscribers, 20–50 leads, 50–80 MQLs, 80–100 SQLs) and automate score updates and lifecycle stage changes in your CRM - If the contact combined score is between X and X, set lifecycle stage to X

Finally, trigger alerts for stakeholders when a contact reaches SQL status so they can take over nurturing towards a sale.

[Janet_MSS · Accepted solution]

Hi @EHagel ,

These are already some great tips and resources. 

I always start the planning process outside of the tool in order to answer the questions already mentioned:

1) Who is your ICP, what demographic information helps you identifiy a good fit? Do you have different tiers of ICP - such as different industries or different levels of decision makers? For example, in one company our target industries are different based on geographic region so we created separated demographic scores per region to be able to create more accurate scores.

2) What engagements or behaviors indicate buying intent or where they are in the buying cycle for your company? This can be very different depending on the type of serice or product that you sell and the kind of marketing and sales outreach you do. For example, do you have webinars or videos that would indicate low buying intent vs high buying intent? Do you have a pricing page or demo that is a high signal that you want to make sure it goes to sales immediately?

3) Think about how you want those behavior points to accumulate and how quickly you want prespostices who are researching to get to sales. For example, I think in terms of is 3 blog post views and/or 2 gated asset downloads enough activity for sales to engage - do they need to have more or less? Definitely work with your sales team and be ready to test and itereate a bit at first.

One of the things that I like about Hubspot's scoring tool is that we can create a score cap for certain activity. For example, we have a cap on how many points can accumulate for email clicks and web page visits. This helps us prevent "tire kickers" who are consuming a lot of low level content from getting sent to sales reps.

I hope you find this helpful.

[Muyambo · Accepted solution]

Hey @EHagel, 

Hopefully you find this useful! 

Our lead scoring process usually begins by defining an ideal customer profile (ICP) with the sales team - best advice I can give here is to analyse your best customers to identify shared traits.

Next, choose key behaviours to track from those best customers, like visiting pricing or product pages, downloading content or attending webinars, and assign fair positive and negative scores (core advice is don’t go crazy with the scores as tempting as it might be ha!)

Then set clear thresholds (for example, 0–20 subscribers, 20–50 leads, 50–80 MQLs, 80–100 SQLs) and automate score updates and lifecycle stage changes in your CRM - If the contact combined score is between X and X, set lifecycle stage to X

Finally, trigger alerts for stakeholders when a contact reaches SQL status so they can take over nurturing towards a sale.

[IreneG]

Hi Elise, 
I'm not an expert but I implemented a lead scoring system in my two previous companies. 
My general advice is to start simple and test with sales. Some key considerations, most of them mentioned already: 
- A mix of demographic and behavioural points help stand out your ideal prospects. 
- Negative points for actions like not being engaged, unsubscribes, etc.,
- Customise it to your specific lead cycle. Standard lead scoring systems might work for some, but only you and your sales team know how important is an action. It also depends on your systems and what you're actually able to track. 
- Reset the points. Make sure you have a system to reset the points (or add a lot of negative points) if the leads are passed back from sales because they're not ready. 
- Test it with sales. If sales start getting a lot of leads that are not ready, they will lose interest and it will be much more difficult to gain their trust on marketing leads int he future, so keep an open conversation and collaboration on the design and testing of the lead scoring system. 

[RubenBurdin · Accepted solution]

Hi @EHagel 

Lead scoring gets really impactful when you go beyond the basics and start combining different data points creatively.

A few approaches you might consider:

• Behavioral + Demographic Mix: Instead of just giving points for “visited a pricing page” or “opened an email,” try combining them. For example: a contact who works at a company over 200 employees and has visited your case study page twice could be scored higher than each action alone.
• Engagement Patterns: Look for sequences, not just isolated actions. Someone who downloads an ebook and then signs up for a webinar in the same week shows intent worth more than those actions separately
• Negative Scoring: Don’t forget to subtract points for disengagement (like no opens in 60 days) or unfit criteria (like students if you only sell B2B). It keeps the pipeline clean.
• Creative Triggers: Use signals outside the obvious. Did they interact with your chatbot? Did they share your content on LinkedIn? Even small signals like returning to your site at unusual hours can sometimes highlight urgency or buying intentt
• Sales Alignment: The most important part is to test your scoring with Sales. Ask them: “Would you want to talk to this person?” Their feedback will help you refine the weight of each action.

Sometimes it helps to run a pilot model for a month, see which leads converted to opportunities, and then fine-tune the scoring weights based on that real data.

[EHagel]

Thank you!! Can you explain a little more how you set the 'engagement patters'? Particularly how we can track someones movement within a week or a month?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @EHagel,

Happy to help, do you have any specific questions?

To get you started, I would recommend these resources:

• Understand the lead scoring tool: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/scoring/understand-the-lead-scoring-tool
• Understanding HubSpot Lead Scoring: https://academy.hubspot.com/lessons/understanding-hubspot-lead-scoring
• Would Sales Want Them? | Time To Rethink Lead Scoring Before the Sunset: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF5jW-jiU7s

Best regards

[Victor_Becerra]

Hi @EHagel 
Thank you for reaching out to the Community!
I'd like to invite some community members who are subject matter experts to join this conversation.
@karstenkoehler @Gaurav_Aggarwal @Lucila-Andimol - Would you be able to share any insights on this? Your expertise would be greatly appreciated.
Best,
Victor