B2B lead scoring helps sales and marketing teams focus on the most promising leads and identify those that aren’t ready or likely to become paying customers. The question is - how to set it up right?
Discover what information to include in your lead scoring model, how to assign value to different behaviors, and how to integrate lead scoring into your overall lead-gen strategy. We’ll guide you through the basics of lead scoring and help you get started, including setting it up in HubSpot. Plus, you can download and use our own lead scoring templates.
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring involves assigning numerical values or points to leads based on their attributes and behavior. This process helps you determine where each lead is in the sales process: whether they are ready to become customers or need more nurturing. Lead scoring can optimize your marketing and sales efforts because you’re focusing on leads that show higher potential for conversion.
What information do you need to qualify a good lead?
Data is crucial when building a successful lead scoring model, so make sure to include and consider several types of information. We suggest four key metrics:
- Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Data: This includes data that aligns with your ideal customer profile, be it industry, revenue, number of employees, and web technologies used. You can enrich HubSpot with ICP data from third-party tools (Vainu, SimilarWeb, or Apollo).
- Demographic information: Such information includes business email, phone number, job title, and buyer persona alignment. By scoring leads based on demographic data, you can ensure they fit your target audience.
- Engagements: Measure engagements such as form submissions, email open and click rates, page views, and product engagements. These actions indicate the level of interest and engagement a lead has shown in your brand.
- Buying intent: Look for specific behaviors that demonstrate a lead's buying intent, such as contacting sales, booking a demo, or calculating the price. These actions indicate that the lead is actively interested in your offerings.
Even though a lead has engaged with your website or emails - and they got a good score - they might not be in the market for your product or service. Therefore, build your lead score with both positive and negative values to deduct points from those whose interactions indicate less interest in your brand or whose characteristics do not align with your ICP.
And remember to score based on recency, because you don’t want to chase leads that reached a certain amount of points a year ago.
What type of behavior or engagement indicates buying intent?
Without a defined set of actions, your marketing team might end up pitching leads that aren’t ready to move on to the sales process. To identify buying intent, consider these examples of data, behavior and events:
- ICP data: Look for alignment with revenue, industry, web technologies, and other ICP-related attributes.
- Demographic data: Assess demographic data such as business email or job title.
- Unique form submissions: Determine the type of form submissions the lead has completed - were they in the middle or bottom of the funnel?
- Email opens and clicks: Measure email opens and clicks to gauge the lead's interest and responsiveness to your email campaigns.
- Page views: Which pages on the website are your leads browsing? Blog, product pages, or maybe pricing? This will give you an indication of where your leads are in the buyer’s journey.
- Product engagement: See if your leads are signing up for a freemium version of your product, starting a free trial, or engaging with product tours. This kind of behavior demonstrates an intent to explore your product offerings.
- Recency: Score leads based on the recency of their engagements, such as the last email clicked, website visit, or product engagement. Recent interactions indicate higher relevance and potential interest.
- Trigger events: Certain events, such as if a lead contacts sales, books a demo, or asks for price calculation all indicate high buying intent.
How to build a lead scoring framework
We’ve built a lead scoring framework specifically for SaaS companies. Our lead scoring framework categorizes leads into 4 different groups based on the points gained.
The framework ensures that no valuable leads fall through the cracks and enables you to focus on prospects with the highest potential for revenue generation.
You can copy-paste or modify this framework to fit your sales process. Just keep in mind that lead scoring works as a part of your lead generation strategy, see it as a supplement to your other lead qualification efforts.
And now, how to go about those lead score points? You’ll need to set up a lead scoring matrix.
How to create a lead scoring matrix
To set up a lead-scoring matrix, assign point values to different lead attributes and actions based on their importance and relevance to your business.
Download our lead scoring matrix template
Once you’ve assigned point values to each attribute and action, you can calculate the total score for each lead by summing up the points they have accumulated. Based on the lead-scoring matrix, you can classify leads into different categories, such as leads, radar leads, research leads, and revenue leads.
How to set up lead scoring on HubSpot
HubSpot offers a built-in lead scoring feature called HubSpot Score, which allows you to automate the scoring process. Navigate to Contact Properties, search for “HubSpot Score”, open it up, and define your rules for positive and negative scores:
Test your lead scoring model for better results
Once you’ve built your lead scoring model, test and validate it to ensure its effectiveness. We recommend a minimum of four weeks of test running (depending on your volume of leads), and then you can start reviewing it. Here’s what to look for during the testing period:
Test the quality of research and revenue leads
- Do they match the definitions of the Radar-Research-Revenue (RRR) framework?
- Are they ready to be vetted by inside sales (research)?
- Are they ready to be worked by sales (revenue)?
Adjust points
- Do you need to adjust your points up/down to make sure leads are nurtured correctly?
- Do you need additional trigger points for negative scoring based on patterns in bad-fit leads?
Review your lead scoring model bi-weekly and every time you launch new campaigns, add new features to products or change things around on your website. Anything that has an effect on your conversion points will also affect the lead scoring model so adjust it accordingly.
Webinar recording
This blog post is based on a Nordics SaaS HubSpot User Group (HUG) webinar. HUG events help HubSpot users learn from proven inbound business success stories, share best practices, and connect with like-minded professionals facing similar challenges.
