Lead Scoring & Segmentation | Allbound Revolution Ep #4

Allbound Revolution Podcast Ep #04: Lead Scoring & Segmentation - How to Stop Wasting Your Sales Team's Time

In the fourth episode of The Allbound Revolution,Tamara Salamonovitz,  Maya Voss, and Lexi Gilbert break down how to ditch the outdated MQL obsession, use buyer intent and AI scoring in HubSpot, and actually get sales to trust your leads again. If you’re tired of bloated scores and siloed teams, this convo’s your roadmap to relevance.

Check it out! 👇

5 Minute Rundown:

Most Lead Scores Don’t Help Sales Prioritize

Lead scoring is supposed to help sales focus on the right people. But most of the time, it just clutters the CRM with false positives. The model rewards generic actions (such as clicking an email, visiting a landing page or downloading a guide) but it rarely tells you whether the person is qualified, interested, or even a real opportunity.

The issue is that the model is trying to answer the wrong question. Instead of “Did they engage with something?” it should be “Does this person have a reason to buy, and are they acting like it?”

A scoring model that only looks at engagement is easy to game. A good model looks at fit, intent, and timing together. If you miss one, you’re either handing off junk or ignoring actual buyers. Either way, sales loses trust, and the model gets ignored.

Buyer Intent Tells You Who’s Interested Before They Convert

There’s a lot of activity happening before someone ever fills out a form. People hit your homepage, check your pricing page, look at your product features...and then leave. That doesn’t mean they’re not interested, it just means they didn’t raise their hand yet.

That’s where buyer intent tools in HubSpot come in. You can track which companies are repeatedly visiting your site, what content they’re looking at, and how frequently. It’s not contact-level detail, but it’s enough to spot patterns.

From there, RevPartners uses Clay to pull in the right contacts from those companies, enrich them with firmographic and role-based data, and add them to targeted outbound sequences. It’s all about surfacing the leads showing signs of interest, even if they haven’t formally converted.

Scoring Models Break When They Inflate Low-Value Actions

One of the most common problems with lead scoring is inflation. Someone watches a webinar, visits a few blog posts, maybe opens a couple of emails, and suddenly they’ve hit your MQL threshold. Sales follows up and finds out the lead isn’t serious, or not even in the right role.

This happens because most models give points for every interaction, no matter the context. If your scoring setup doesn’t put limits on how much weight someone can earn from a single type of behavior, you’re going to end up with inflated scores and annoyed reps.

HubSpot’s latest scoring tool finally lets you handle this the right way. You can group similar actions, set a max point value per group, and add time decay so old behaviors fade out. That means someone who poked around your blog last month isn’t still showing up as a hot lead today.

Predictive Scoring Is Already Available in HubSpot

Scoring doesn’t need to be fully manual. If you’re using HubSpot’s Marketing or Sales Hub at the Enterprise level, you’ve already got predictive scoring available, you just might not be using it. HubSpot uses your historical win data to calculate a “Likelihood to Close” score for each contact. It factors in company size, job title, industry, past engagement, and more. Then it tiers leads into high, medium, or low likelihood based on what’s worked in the past.

You don’t have to build the model yourself or figure out what behaviors matter. HubSpot does the math. All you have to do is add the property to your contact views, build a few workflows or lists around it, and monitor how it aligns with your actual deals.

It won’t replace a custom scoring system if you need deep segmentation, but it’s a fast way to add another layer of prioritization that’s backed by your actual data.

If Sales Isn’t Using the Score, Something’s Off

You can’t fix lead quality if no one’s saying what’s wrong. If sales is ignoring the score and marketing isn’t getting feedback, the model’s just sitting there. What actually works is super basic: track what converts, what doesn’t, and why. Make reps give disqualification reasons. Look at those every week.

At RevPartners, we build simple HubSpot dashboards that show what’s getting through and what’s working. If junk leads are slipping in from a campaign, you’ll see it fast and fix it before it piles up.

Scoring’s not a set-it-and-forget-it deal. It only works if both teams are in the loop and adjusting based on real outcomes.