Maximizing HubSpot's Lead Scoring: Tips and Best Practices?

[ZBrady]

You may have implemented lead scoring to help prioritize and qualify leads based on their level of engagement with your brand. However, are you fully utilizing the capabilities of HubSpot's lead scoring system? In this HubSpot community post, I want to explore tips and best practices for maximizing the effectiveness of lead scoring in HubSpot. I invite all HubSpot users to share their experiences and insights on how to optimize lead scoring, improve lead quality, and ultimately drive more conversions. So, how do you make the most of HubSpot's lead scoring feature? Let's discuss!

[JenBergren · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the tag! I don't personally have a contribution but I think my lead scoring hero Liam has a few ideas! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTy2wUff25U&t=4s

I can't find his community user name, but maybe @RemotishAgency can bug him to share here 🙂

[danmoyle · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the tag @kvlschaefer 😊  Great prompt for discussion @ZBrady! 

My first inclination in lead scoring is to collaborate with sales. Ask them what makes a good lead from an informational stand point (what do they need to know, what are nice-to-know), from a behavioral POV (website visits, specific page views, social media interactions, form fills),  and other indicators of what they say makes a good lead. 

Then I look at the CRM data to see if that's the case. Are closed-won deals and their contacts proving the theory? What about closed-lost? 

From there it's a matter of experimenting. I put together some of the lead scoring criteria into my HubSpot score, and then see if it matches what good leads look like. So, does a customer have a score that would match what sales wants? 

Additionally, I would try to find the leading indicators of a good lead for sales, and work backward on how they got there. For example, if a demo request or discovery call inquiry (form fill) is a good indicator, what typical behavior happened before that? This would help me build the path of incremental steps to beocming a marketing qualified lead (MQL) so I can do some contextual marketing and help them along the journey. 

Above all, be willing to experiment, test, iterate, and grow. Lead scoring is an artistic science, not an exact science. 

[DomRychlik]

Hi all,

I'm Dom, a Product Manager at HubSpot. My team and I are currently delving into Lead Scoring for Marketers and are really interested in learning more about your use cases. We’d like to find out how you are currently scoring your leads, what’s working for you and what’s not working at the moment and what features you would like to see incorporated into HubSpot in the future. 

If you’re a marketer interested in lead scoring and open to a brief 30-minute call with me and my team, please feel free to reach out to me via a direct message.  

Best,

Dom

[MMayer32]

Hi Dom! I would love to get on a call with you and your team. I am curreently revamping a Lead Scoring Model in Hubspot that used workflows, custom copies of standard fields, and reports to follow. I am trying to set up predictive lead scoring using lists to consolidate activities and layer on a time decay. Feel free to email me at matthew.mayer@isovalent.com and we can set up time to discuss what has been working and what hasn't.

[KBurr]

Hey Dom - I'd love to chat lead scoring. Can be available for a 30-min call next week?

[danmoyle]

Thank you for reaching out to us in the community @DomRychlik ! 

[jolle · Accepted solution]

Great question, @ZBrady! And thanks for the mention, @kvlschaefer!!

Awesome thoughts from @danmoyle and @JenBergren as usual 🙂 I agree that lead scoring should be a joint effort that evolves as you incorporate additional assets and criteria.

One of the tricky parts of lead scoring in HubSpot is that you're limited to 100 total positive and negative scoring criteria. Definitely keep an eye out for opportunities to consolidate your criteria (i.e., establishing a form naming convention, like "[eBook]," so you can score off of the inclusion of that tag within a form vs each individual form).

Be sure that you have appropriate response actions teed up based on lead score. You don't necessarily need to just set an internal email workflow that will notify the team once someone hits your target lead score. You can trigger email workflows based on lead score once someone gets to a relatively engaged point.

Also be sure to factor out any non-leads within lead scoring. HubSpot will assign a score to every single contact, but you can subtract a huge amount of points (I usually deduct 10,000) if someone is a non-lead (i.e., distributor, vendor, employee), bounced, unsubscribed, or unqualified. Your use case will vary, but you want to make sure that the sales team never receives lead scoring notifications for non-leads or current customers.

Thanks again for opening up this conversation!!

[danmoyle]

Great callout on the limitation of criteria @jolle! I've seen folks also use lists to get around that, creating lists for specific criteria (nearly infinite) and using "list membeship" as the scoring criteria. 

Good stuff as always Jacob! 

[danmoyle · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the tag @kvlschaefer 😊  Great prompt for discussion @ZBrady! 

My first inclination in lead scoring is to collaborate with sales. Ask them what makes a good lead from an informational stand point (what do they need to know, what are nice-to-know), from a behavioral POV (website visits, specific page views, social media interactions, form fills),  and other indicators of what they say makes a good lead. 

Then I look at the CRM data to see if that's the case. Are closed-won deals and their contacts proving the theory? What about closed-lost? 

From there it's a matter of experimenting. I put together some of the lead scoring criteria into my HubSpot score, and then see if it matches what good leads look like. So, does a customer have a score that would match what sales wants? 

Additionally, I would try to find the leading indicators of a good lead for sales, and work backward on how they got there. For example, if a demo request or discovery call inquiry (form fill) is a good indicator, what typical behavior happened before that? This would help me build the path of incremental steps to beocming a marketing qualified lead (MQL) so I can do some contextual marketing and help them along the journey. 

Above all, be willing to experiment, test, iterate, and grow. Lead scoring is an artistic science, not an exact science. 

[AGiese-Spacek]

@danmoyle is it possible to setup a report of some kind to help monitor lead scoring activity over time? We implemented lead scoring recently and I know it should be iterative but I am struggling to figure out how analyze what is or isn't working. Would appreciate any support!

[danmoyle]

@AGiese-Spacek hi! Reporting on data "over time" in HubSpot is tricky in some cases. Here's a discussion with more details from my friend @karstenkoehler : Static Hubspot data over time

And another: Comparative Reporting over Time

As for the details of your question, you can probably look at individual contacts and their scores one by one, but I can't think of a HubSpot report that would show changes in contact scores over time. That feels like it would be too much data. 

However, you could potentaly build static lists over time, like one each month for two quarters, and then compare changes in the lists. Then you can analyze the effectiveness and accuracy of the lead scoring, seeing how contact scores changed from quarter to quarter. 

[JenBergren · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the tag! I don't personally have a contribution but I think my lead scoring hero Liam has a few ideas! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTy2wUff25U&t=4s

I can't find his community user name, but maybe @RemotishAgency can bug him to share here 🙂

[kvlschaefer]

Hi @ZBrady,

Thank you for kicking off this conversation in the Community!

Let's invite our community members to this conversation to get the discussion going.

Hi @danmoyle, @jolle, @JenBergren, @Phil_Vallender, @Jonno_Price, @Jnix284 - How do you make the most out of HubSpot lead scoring? Do you have any best practices or tips for @ZBrady?

Thank you! 

Best,

Kristen