HubSpot Lead Scoring, a tool to prioritize and qualify leads in CRM through predictive or manual lead scoring.
In this detailed guide, we will cover
Lead scoring is an effective way to allocate time and money in such a way that it generates maximum ROI for the business as it grows.
In CRMs, leads and contacts are coming but not all of them are worth the effort and time of the sales team members or your marketing team. In order, to overcome this hurdle HubSpot provides a feature known as Lead scoring.
In simple terms, lead scoring is a way of analyzing and ranking your leads according to their suitability and the importance for your business.
Let's say, a lead has visited your landing page three times which is an indicator that the prospect is close to converting. By giving a score to this attribute, (lead visiting your landing page three times) all leads that have visited your landing page will be given a numerical score and they will rank based on this.
With HubSpot’s recent updates, you can now create separate engagement and fit scores to measure different aspects of a lead’s interaction and suitability.
This will make it easier for your sales and marketing team to focus their efforts on such leads to maximize conversions.
You can also give a negative score for certain attributes that your leads might acquire or have. A lead visiting your landing page might give them 10 points but if that lead's annual revenue is less than $1 million then you can give a negative score for this attribute too.
However, HubSpot’s latest update has replaced negative scoring with the ability to exclude up to five lists of contacts or companies from being scored entirely, allowing you to focus on relevant leads without penalizing others.
Lead Scoring for SaaS, real estate, construction, and many other sectors is becoming increasingly important to maximize business efficiency. Therefore, it is equally essential to understand the benefits of using HubSpot lead scoring and how it can do wonders for your business. Some of the benefits are:
Companies that randomly pursue leads will never be able to operate at their optimum potential. To have an effective sales and marketing strategy your team needs to know what to say, when to say it, and to whom it should be said.
By using lead scoring HubSpot you can have an exact idea of where your lead stands by looking at what type of pages they are visiting your website or the type of content they download from your website.
Additionally, with the new score decay feature, older interactions gradually decrease in value, ensuring that recent actions are given more weight in the lead scoring process.
You can then use the information to display the right type of message, at the right time, to the right person.
B2B companies that have their sales and marketing efforts aligned experience 24% faster revenue growth, according to SiriusDecisions.
The idea here is that both sales and marketing departments have different concepts of what they think is a hot lead if the criteria are subjective.
Therefore, building an objective and quantitative framework of lead scoring by taking input from both sales and marketing departments will firstly, develop a very strong lead scoring model.
Secondly, sales and marketing efforts will become streamlined and this will make it easier for both departments to understand their lead better from each other’s point of view.
By employing your labor and budget resources effectively, you can decrease your cost per lead and increase your revenue. Lead scoring HubSpot can help you become a cost-effective business in two main ways.
Firstly, you’ll be able to prioritize leads on how close they are to buying your service. By doing frequent follow-ups and investing more time in such leads you can cater to their needs promptly and efficiently.
Secondly, HubSpot lead scoring will also help you identify the pain points your lead might be experiencing and what can be done in order to push them towards converting.
Clicking a CTA or visiting a certain page of the website are all types of HubSpot lead scoring attributes that indicate when leads are ready to initiate a discussion.
With the integration of tools like Amplitude, you can now include product usage data such as feature engagement and time spent in your app into your scoring model, enhancing the accuracy of engagement scores.
Therefore, the sales reps would have a clear idea of what the prospect is interested in which can then help him to target the lead with the right words.
It also indicates to the sales reps to a certain extent the pain points of the leads that can be addressed while having a conversation with them.
Following are two main ways you can implement lead scoring HubSpot in your business.
Predictive HubSpot lead scoring is done using machine learning where the system will analyze hundreds of different data points to determine the lead score of a particular prospect.
It will use data from past customers and current prospects to determine, what causes a lead to convert, and based on that it will predict the conversion probability for future leads.
Conversions usually have one or more similarities in them which forced them to convert therefore, predictive lead scoring will skim through such similarities and then score future leads.
Additionally, for users with Marketing Hub Enterprise, the AI-assisted scoring feature (currently in Private Beta) automatically prioritizes leads by using machine learning to predict which leads are most likely to convert based on historical data and behavior patterns.
Advantages of using predictive lead scoring:
The Manual lead scoring HubSpot method would normally require insights from marketing and sales departments in terms of the attributes to choose for setting the criteria for manual lead scoring.
Once the attributes have been carefully selected, they would then be assigned numerical scores depending on their importance. Once the criteria have been selected, HubSpot will start to score leads on the basis of these criteria.
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There are a number of ways you can choose attributes for your manual lead scoring criteria. Let's discuss each one of them.
With the introduction of engagement and fit scores, HubSpot allows you to evaluate both the behavior and suitability of your leads more comprehensively.
Demographics:
Demographics include race, sex, location, income, education, marital status, and employment. Let's say your ideal lead is someone who is single and has an income of more than $80,000 annually. By putting this as a criterion under positive attributes, such leads will be given a high score.
On the other hand, let's say if a lead has an annual income of more than $80,000 but is married then it will be given fewer points in comparison to someone who has a salary of more than $80,000 and is single.
You can ask demographic questions through forms.
Company information:
You can also score your leads through companies that they are associated with.
For instance, if you are a sales trainer who provides training to salespersons of different companies. You might have certain requirements in terms of what companies you want to work with.
Let's say you only work with companies who have an annual turnover of more than $2 million and the strength of their sales team is about 50 people. By setting this criterion you’ll be able to score companies and focus on those that are meaningful to you.
Online behavior:
This includes everything such as how a customer is engaging with the content, what type of pages they are visiting, how much time they spend on your website, and what documents or offers they download on your website.
Knowing this information can give you important insights into what phase the customer is in the sales funnel and what can be done in order to convert them. Therefore, if you want to score leads on online behavior you can do that in multiple ways.
For instance, leads who fill contact us form would be given high points because they are most probably asking you to contact them in order to avail of your service. This is how you can use online behavior to score leads.
Email engagement:
HubSpot provides detailed information on how your leads interact with your emails. It will tell you about leads who have opted out to receive your promotion email, leads who have opened your promotion emails, and the ones who clicked them.
By having this information, your sales team can have a very accurate idea of whether the prospect will convert or not. You can use this data to score your leads and focus on leads who are more engaging with your emails.
Spam detection:
If you’re dealing with companies only then you can take away points for email addresses that don’t have a business email address.
Talk to your sales and marketing team:
The best insight about what attributes you need to choose for HubSpot lead scoring criteria can be taken from the sales and marketing team.
The sales team interacts with the leads on a daily basis and therefore they have a very good understanding of what type of clients convert, on what basis they convert, and what the majority of converted clients have in common.
Secondly, the marketing department can also give you very useful insights into what type of leads end up converting. For instance, what particular content that they might download on the website will indicate to you that the lead is close to converting.
The information from both departments can be taken to create a criterion that will work.
Talk to your customers:
Sometimes your sales and marketing team might think that a lead has converted for one particular reason but in reality, the customer might have converted because of a totally different reason.
Taking feedback from customers through survey forms can also provide insights on what made the lead choose you over your competitor. This can then become a basis for the criteria you make for lead scoring HubSpot.
Analytics:
By looking at analytics you can get to know important information such as what type of content a lead sees before converting. You can run an attribution report which will tell you which type of efforts lead to conversions. You can use this information to set up criteria for lead scoring.
To set up a predictive lead scoring model you don’t have to do a lot. It’s a very simple and easy process. Following is the process of how you can incorporate predictive lead scoring in your business:
Step 1: Click on the Settings icon which is in the main navigation bar
Step 2: From the left sidebar, locate properties and click on it
Step 3: In Contact Properties, search for Likelihood to close and Contact priority
The likelihood to close will give you a score that will show the probability of a contact converting within the next 90 days.
HubSpot has calculated this score by using contact properties and how the contact has been interacting with your business. A score of 22 would mean that there is a 22% chance that the contact will convert in the next 90 days.
Contact priority would use the likelihood to close the score to filter segments of your best and worst leads.
To set up manual lead scoring, follow the steps below:
Step 1: Click on the Settings icon from the navigation bar
Step 2: On the left sidebar under Data management, find properties and click on it
Step 3: In the search bar, write “HubSpot Score” and click on the property
Step 4: Start adding your criteria, this would include the positive and negative attributes on which you want to score your leads.
To prioritize contacts and companies in your CRM, you can build custom scores based on actions or properties. HubSpot's new lead scoring tool allows you to create engagement scores to qualify leads based on actions or fit scores based on demographic information.
Here’s how to manually build a score in the new system:
You can now manage scores from the lead scoring homepage, where you can view performance reports, set thresholds to trigger workflows and track the history of your scores.
If you’re thinking that once the HubSpot lead scoring model has been implemented, nothing else needs to be done then you’re wrong. The success of lead scoring HubSpot is directly associated with how often you’re updating your criteria based on the feedback loop.
Firstly, it is important that you regularly keep the marketing and the sales team engaged. Keep getting their feedback on what makes a lead qualified. What attributes of a particular lead tell them whether it will convert or not? Use this information to regularly update your criteria for HubSpot lead scoring so that criteria don’t get outdated.
Moreover, monitoring the model is as much important as its iteration. Therefore, once you’ve implemented the model it is also important that you monitor it regularly to see if it's working or not.
If it's not working, and the leads recommended by the model are not converting as you’ve expected them to then you need to make some adjustments.
One important point to consider is how your marketing and sales departments will assist each other by bringing a lead into the sales funnel, nurturing it, and then converting it into a sales-qualified lead.
You can use HubSpot lead scoring to turn a prospect from a marketing-qualified lead into a sales-qualified lead. Let's have a look at the following table to better understand how you can do so.
| Lead Level | HubSpot Lead Score | Marketing Team Strategy |
| Prospect | Less than 10 | Do Nothing |
| Lead | 10 - 20 |
Retargeting Ads Send Marketing Emails |
| MQL | 20 - 40 | Specific marketing based on persona |
| SQL | More than 40 | Pass MQL to the Sales team |
This is one example of how you would want to nurture your lead as it goes through different stages once its HubSpot score changes. As the lead’s score increases, your marketing department can define the strategy that it needs to implement in order to further increase the lead’s score. Once the marketing team has achieved a specific score for a lead it can then be passed on to the sales department as sales qualified lead.
HubSpot’s new scoring thresholds allow you to set specific score levels (e.g., 40 points) at which a lead can be automatically passed from marketing to sales, ensuring leads are engaged at the right time without manual intervention.
By using this model, you will be able to streamline your efforts and increase conversion rates by a good margin. Not only, does it target each lead with specific content designed to push it to the next stage but also saves the sales department’s time as they will be engaging with only those leads that have already been nurtured and are interested in the service being offered.
This is how you can use HubSpot lead scoring to make your company’s operations more efficient which can result in major growth.
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HubSpot Lead scoring can also be used in automation in several different ways. For example, for lead scoring, there is a HubSpot property known as “HubSpot Score”.
To be able to use HubSpot Lead scoring in automation, what you can do is that whenever a lead hits a specific score you can notify your sales team that this leads needs to be contacted.
Moreover, you can also send a specific type of content to leads via emails once they hit a certain score in the “HubSpot score” property.
There are a number of ways in which you can use HubSpot lead scoring when trying to make reports. These reports are useful and indicate a lot of things such as how many leads score between “70-100” or you can also see how many leads are under positive attribution and how many leads are under negative attribution.
Such reports can provide you with a lot of information such as whether quality leads are being generated or not. For example, if you rank your leads on a scale of “1-100” with “1” being the lowest score and “100” being the highest.
Generating a report to see how many leads fall in the category of “1-40” will tell you that the lead quality is not good if the majority of leads fall in that category.
Therefore, you need to use lead scoring not only for the purpose of focusing on leads that mean the most to your business but also to get insights into what type of prospects come into your sales funnel. Once the problem is identified you can fix that and this can help you in maximizing your profits.
HubSpot Lead scoring is a perfect way to utilize the company resources effectively and efficiently. Not only does it help in creating better coordination between the sales and marketing teams but it also leads the think tank of the business to understand what should be said, at what time it should be said, and to whom it should be said in order to maximize ROI.
Moreover, companies that generate numerous leads on a daily basis should definitely use HubSpot lead scoring as they would like to focus on leads that mean the most to them when it comes to doing business and making profits.
With HubSpot’s recent updates, including the ability to create engagement and fit scores, integrate product usage data via Amplitude, exclude specific contact or company lists from scoring, implement score decay, and utilize AI-assisted scoring in Marketing Hub Enterprise, businesses can achieve even greater precision and efficiency in their lead management processes.
We have tried to cover all the aspects of HubSpot Lead Scoring based on their current status but the features are evolving. If there is a query or suggestion, please do let us know and our consultants will respond asap.
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