How To Master Lead Scoring in HubSpot

Introduction to Lead Scoring

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is basically your way of figuring out which leads are worth chasing and which ones need a little more time before they’re ready. It’s all about ranking leads based on two key things: fit and engagement.

• Fit: Does this lead look like the kind of customer you’re trying to attract? Think job title, industry, company size—basically, how well they match your ideal customer profile.
• Engagement: How interested are they in what you’re offering? Are they opening your emails, visiting your site, downloading your resources? The more they interact, the higher their engagement.

Why Lead Scoring is Important

Lead scoring goes beyond simply organizing your leads—it elevates your entire sales and marketing process. Here’s why it makes all the difference:

• Boosts Marketing Efficiency: By targeting the most qualified leads, your marketing team can create more tailored campaigns that speak directly to their needs, cutting down on time spent nurturing dead-end prospects.
• Aligns Sales and Marketing: No more finger-pointing between sales and marketing about lead quality. With a clear lead scoring system, both teams know when a lead is ready to be handed off, which leads to smoother handoffs and better results.
  
• Increases Conversion Rates: Your sales team won’t be wasting time on low-quality leads. Instead, they’ll be laser-focused on the leads most likely to close, which means more deals and less chasing.

Lead Scoring in HubSpot

HubSpot takes lead scoring to the next level with custom scoring for both contacts and companies. And the best part? You can use those scores across all of HubSpot’s tools to automate processes, create smart segments, and pull detailed reports.

If you're new to HubSpot or looking to implement a scoring system from scratch, explore our HubSpot Onboarding Services to get set up quickly and efficiently.

• Custom Lead Scoring: HubSpot lets you set up your own scoring system, where you can give positive or negative points to contacts based on things like behaviors (think page views or email clicks) and attributes (like their job role or company size). Among the lead scoring tools, HubSpot stands out for its customization options, allowing you to tailor scores based on specific attributes and behaviors. 
• Score Triggers for Workflows: Want to send a hot lead directly to your sales team as soon as they hit a certain score? HubSpot’s workflows make that easy. You can use lead scores to automatically trigger actions—like sending them a personalized email or assigning them to a rep.
  
  For advanced configurations, including automated workflows and custom actions, our HubSpot Technical Consulting service can help you fine-tune your lead management process.
• Reporting with Lead Scores: HubSpot’s reports give you a clear picture of how your scoring system is performing. When building your scoring system, it's important to follow HubSpot lead scoring best practices to ensure you're targeting the right leads with accuracy.You can track lead scores to see what’s working, what’s not, and adjust your scoring rules to make sure you’re always optimizing your lead pipeline. You can even look at HubSpot lead scoring examples to understand how other businesses are using scores to drive success.

In short, HubSpot makes lead scoring simple, powerful, and super effective at helping your team prioritize the leads that really matter.

Understanding Score Models in HubSpot

When it comes to lead scoring in HubSpot, you’ve got two main types of scores to work with: Engagement and Fit. Knowing how to use both will help you fine-tune your process and make sure your team is chasing after the right leads.

Engagement Score

The engagement score measures how prospects are interacting with your brand. Are they checking out your website? Opening emails? Attending webinars? The more they engage, the higher their score. 

Fit Score

The fit score is all about whether a prospect aligns with your ideal customer profile (ICP). This score looks at things like job title, company size, industry, and location. By aligning your fit score with your buyer persona, you ensure that the leads you target are a great match for your ideal customer. It helps you figure out if this lead is the right type of person for your product or service, regardless of how much they’re engaging right now.

Balancing Fit and Engagement Scores

It’s important to strike a balance between fit and engagement when you’re scoring leads.

A lead with a great engagement score but poor fit might be interested, but they’re probably not going to become a customer. On the flip side, a lead that’s a perfect fit but hasn’t engaged yet might need more nurturing. The goal is to build a scoring system that accounts for both, so you’re prioritizing leads who are both interested and aligned with your ICP.

By using a balanced approach to fit and engagement scores, you’ll make sure your sales team is spending time on leads that not only have high interest but also high potential to convert into customers.

How to Build Lead Scores in HubSpot

Now that we’ve covered what engagement and fit scores are, let’s get into how to actually build them in HubSpot. Whether you’re starting from scratch or fine-tuning an existing system, HubSpot makes it easy to set up custom scores for both engagement and fit. Here's a step-by-step guide to get you going.

Creating Custom Engagement and Fit Scores

First things first, you’ll need to navigate to the lead scoring section in HubSpot. It’s pretty straightforward, but let's walk through how to create both engagement and fit scores so you can start prioritizing leads ASAP.

Step-by-Step Instructions: Creating an Engagement Score

1. Navigate to Marketing > Lead Scoring
   Head into HubSpot and go to the lead scoring section under the Marketing tab.
2. Click “Create Score”
   You’ll have the option to create a score for either contacts or companies. Choose engagement score here to focus on how active your leads are.
3. Name Your Score
   Give your engagement score a name that’s easy to identify. Something like “High-Activity Leads” will do the trick.
4. Add Event Groups
   Start building your score by adding different events that matter to your business. These might be things like form submissions, email clicks, or webinar attendance. The more events a lead interacts with, the higher their score.
5. Set Rules for Each Event
   Here’s where you can get specific. Assign points for each event, and set caps so no one can game the system by doing the same thing over and over. You can also add decay options to lower points over time, so older interactions don’t over-inflate a lead’s score.

Step-by-Step Instructions: Creating a Fit Score

1. Select “Fit Score”
   When creating a new score, choose the fit score option if you’re focusing on demographic data like job titles, industries, or company size.
2. Define Your Criteria
   Here’s where you determine what a perfect-fit lead looks like. Add attributes that align with your ideal customer profile (ICP)—things like senior-level job titles or companies in your target industries.
3. Assign Point Values
   For each attribute, assign points based on how closely a lead matches your ICP. For example, you might give more points for C-level executives in the tech industry and fewer points for junior roles in other sectors.

By setting up both engagement and fit scores, you’ll create a system that helps you prioritize leads who are not only actively engaging but also align with your ideal customer. And with HubSpot’s tools, the whole process is easy and customizable, ensuring you’re always focusing on the right prospects.

Managing and Monitoring Lead Scores

Setting up lead scores is just the beginning. To get the most out of your lead scoring system, you'll need to keep an eye on how those scores are working and tweak them over time. Here’s how to manage and monitor your lead scores like a boss.

How to Review and Edit Scores in HubSpot

Once your lead scores are up and running, it’s important to check in on them regularly to make sure they’re still accurate.

Things change—your target market evolves, your sales cycle shifts—so your lead scores need to keep pace.

• Review Scores: In HubSpot, you can easily view your scores by navigating to the lead scoring section. From there, you can see how your leads are stacking up and check for any patterns.
• Edit Scores: If you notice that certain actions or criteria are being overvalued (or undervalued), go ahead and adjust the score values. Maybe a job title that used to be important is no longer as relevant, or perhaps a certain type of engagement is more valuable now. HubSpot makes it simple to make those adjustments.
  
  Need help with complex integrations or fine-tuning your HubSpot setup? Our HubSpot Integrations service can ensure everything runs smoothly across platforms.
• Ongoing Optimization: Lead scoring isn’t a “set it and forget it” thing. It’s something you’ll want to optimize as your business grows and your needs change. Keep refining your scoring model to ensure you're always prioritizing the right leads.

Setting Up Score Thresholds and Categories

A great way to manage lead scores is by creating score thresholds. These thresholds help you categorize leads into different priority levels so your team knows exactly who to focus on. By incorporating HubSpot lead scoring into your workflows, you can automate the process of moving leads through your pipeline based on their score thresholds.

• High, Medium, Low Priority: Set thresholds to divide leads into buckets like high, medium, or low priority. For example, leads with a score over 70 might be classified as high priority or even Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), while leads with scores between 30-70 might be medium priority and anything under 30 is low priority.
  
  

Using Lead Scores in Workflows and Lists

Lead scores aren’t just for ranking—they can be used to power automation and segmentation in HubSpot. Here’s how to put them to work:

• Workflows: Use lead scores as triggers in your workflows. For example, once a lead reaches a certain score threshold, you could automatically enroll them in a nurturing workflow, send them a targeted email, or assign them to a specific sales rep.
• Lists: Lead scores can also be used to segment your contact lists. This allows you to create highly personalized marketing campaigns. For instance, you can build a list of high-priority leads (those with a score over 70) and send them a specific email series designed to push them toward a sale.

By keeping your scores up to date, setting meaningful thresholds, and incorporating them into your workflows and lists, you’ll have a lead scoring system that not only ranks your leads but actively works to move them through your sales funnel.

Automating Lead Score Management

Do you ever feel like having a lazy (insert any day ending the letter Y)? Well good news–lead scoring can be a hands-off process once you set up some clever automations in HubSpot. Two key ways to keep your lead scores accurate without manual work are score decay and automated resets. Let’s look at how they work and why they’re so useful.

Score Decay and When to Use It

Score decay is all about ensuring your lead scores stay relevant. If a lead hasn’t interacted with your brand for a while, their engagement score shouldn’t stay sky-high. This is where decay comes in—you can automatically lower a lead’s score over time if their interest starts to fade.

• How It Works: Set up a rule in HubSpot that gradually decreases points if a lead hasn’t engaged within a certain period. 
  

   

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  For example, if someone hasn’t opened an email or visited your website in the last 90 days, you can automatically knock off a few points. This prevents inactive leads from clogging up your sales pipeline. If you're new to setting up scoring systems, using a lead scoring template in HubSpot can help you get started quickly and effectively.
• When to Use It: Score decay is perfect for keeping your lead data fresh. It helps your team focus on the leads that are still engaged, rather than wasting time on cold prospects. If a lead perks up again—say, by clicking on a new email—their score can start climbing back up.

Resetting Scores with Workflows

There are times when you’ll want to fully reset a lead’s score, especially if they become inactive or disqualified. HubSpot’s workflows make it easy to automate this process so your team doesn’t have to manually adjust scores.

• How It Works: Use workflows to automatically reset a lead’s score back to zero under certain conditions. For instance, if a lead unsubscribes from your mailing list or if a deal is marked as "Closed-Lost," their score should be wiped clean.
• When to Use It: This is especially useful for keeping your data clean. If a lead is no longer relevant to your sales process, it doesn’t make sense to keep their old score around. Automating resets ensures that your sales team is only focusing on leads that are still in play.

With score decay and workflow resets in place, you can automate the grunt work of lead score management, keeping everything running smoothly while ensuring your scores are always up to date.

For companies migrating from another CRM, our HubSpot Migrations service ensures your lead scores and data transition seamlessly.

Advanced Lead Scoring Features for Enterprise Users

If you're using HubSpot's Marketing Hub Enterprise, then you've got access to some extra top-tier tools. Let’s check out the features that help you automate, fine-tune, and keep tabs on your lead scoring game.

AI-Powered Lead Scoring (Enterprise Only)

For Enterprise users, HubSpot brings in the big guns with AI-powered lead scoring. Instead of manually assigning points based on engagement or fit, the AI does the heavy lifting for you by analyzing contact behavior and demographics to generate scores automatically. This can save a ton of time and get you even more precise results.

• How AI Scoring Works: HubSpot’s AI looks at patterns in your contacts’ lifecycle stages—like when someone moves from a Subscriber to an SQL—and uses that data to optimize how you score leads. Over time, the AI refines its approach, adjusting scores based on what’s working best for your sales process.
• Why It’s Powerful: AI scoring is especially useful if you’re dealing with a large volume of leads and need a more hands-off approach. It continuously learns from your data, so it gets smarter over time. Plus, since the AI is constantly evaluating how leads move through your funnel, you get more accurate scores without having to do a ton of tweaking yourself.

Lead Score Performance Monitoring (Enterprise Only)

One of the best perks of the Enterprise plan is lead score performance monitoring. HubSpot’s reporting tools give you a clear view of how your lead scoring system is performing, so you can track key metrics and make data-driven adjustments.

• What to Track:
  • Number of Contacts Scored: See how many leads are being assigned scores and track that over time.
  • Average Score: This metric gives you a sense of how engaged and aligned your overall lead pool is.
  • Score Distribution: This shows how leads are spread across different thresholds (e.g., how many are low, medium, or high-priority), helping you see if your scoring model is balanced.
• Why It Matters: Monitoring your lead scoring performance is key to making sure your strategy is actually working. If you notice that too many leads are falling into low-priority categories, you can adjust your scoring criteria to better reflect what makes a quality lead. This kind of data helps you fine-tune your system so your sales team is always focused on the right people.

Best Practices for Building Lead Scores in HubSpot

When building your lead scoring model, you want to make sure you're rewarding the right behaviors and profiles while keeping an eye out for red flags. Here are some best practices for defining positive and negative attributes for both fit and engagement scores.

Defining Positive and Negative Attributes for Fit Scores

Fit scores are all about how well a lead matches your ICP. Here’s how to define the traits that should bump a lead’s score up—or down.

• Positive Fit Score Attributes: These are the attributes that scream "perfect match!" for your business.
  
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  • Job Title: Give more points to roles like VP, Director, or C-level executives in your target market.
  • Company Size: If your product works best for mid-sized or large companies, give extra points for leads that fit those ranges.
  • Industry: Leads from industries that align with your niche (e.g., tech, healthcare) should score higher.
  • Location: If you serve specific regions, boost points for leads located in those areas.
  • Revenue: Companies with revenue within your target range should definitely get a bump. One of the key lead scoring best practices is defining the right attributes that truly reflect your ideal customer profile to create more accurate fit scores.
• Negative Fit Score Attributes: These attributes are signals that the lead probably isn’t a good fit for your product.
  • Unqualified Job Titles: Someone with a job title like "Student" or "Intern" isn’t likely to buy, so they should get negative points.
  • Free Email Domains: Leads using generic domains like Gmail or Yahoo are usually less qualified. Subtract points accordingly.
    

     

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  • Irrelevant Industries: Leads from industries that aren’t a great fit for your product—like retail if you’re selling B2B software—should get dinged.

Defining Positive and Negative Attributes for Engagement Scores

Engagement scores tell you how much interest a lead has shown in your brand. Here’s how to reward good behavior and penalize less meaningful interactions.

• Positive Engagement Attributes: These are actions that show the lead is genuinely interested and moving down the funnel.
  • Page Views on Key Pages: Visits to high-value pages like your pricing or demo page should earn extra points.
  • Email Opens: Leads who are regularly opening your emails are engaged, so bump up their score.
  • Form Submissions: When a lead fills out a form—especially for something like a demo or consultation—it’s a clear sign of interest.
• Negative Engagement Attributes: Some actions suggest a lead may be losing interest or isn’t the right fit.
  • Visiting the Careers Page: If they’re checking out your job listings, they might be looking for a job, not your product—so subtract a few points.
  • Unsubscribing from Emails: This is a pretty strong signal that they’re disengaging, so you’ll want to lower their score.
    
    

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Even with a solid lead scoring system in place, there are a few traps you’ll want to steer clear of. Here’s how to avoid the most common mistakes so your scoring system stays sharp and effective.

Over-Scoring Fit or Engagement

One of the biggest mistakes is putting too much emphasis on either fit or engagement, rather than balancing both.

• How to Avoid It: Make sure you’re balancing fit and engagement in your scoring model. Don’t rely on just one—leads with high engagement and poor fit (or vice versa) shouldn’t automatically shoot to the top of your list.

Failing to Adjust Scores Over Time

Another common pitfall is letting your scores stay static. If you’re not adjusting scores over time, you risk inflating the value of outdated interactions.

• How to Avoid It: Implement score decay to reduce points for leads who haven’t engaged in a while. Regularly review and adjust your scoring rules to ensure they’re still in line with your current sales and marketing strategies.

Ignoring Negative Attributes

It’s easy to focus on the positive behaviors, but ignoring the negative ones can really throw off your lead scoring system.

• How to Avoid It: Make sure you’re assigning negative scores for actions that indicate disinterest or misalignment. For example, if someone unsubscribes from your mailing list or visits your careers page, they’re probably not a viable lead and should have points deducted.

By keeping an eye on these common pitfalls and regularly tweaking your scoring model, you’ll ensure that your lead scores stay relevant and effective, helping your team focus on the leads that truly matter.

Wrapping Up Lead Scoring in HubSpot

Quick Highlights

Mastering lead scoring in HubSpot comes down to balancing both fit and engagement to create a system that prioritizes the right leads at the right time. The benefits of lead scoring in HubSpot are clear—your team spends more time on high-quality leads, leading to increased conversion rates and efficiency.

We’ve covered:

• Fit Scores: How to score leads based on their demographic alignment with your ideal customer profile.
• Engagement Scores: How to track lead activity and interactions with your brand.
• Monitoring and Adjusting Scores: The importance of keeping an eye on your scores and refining them over time.
• Automation: Leveraging HubSpot’s workflows to automate score management, including score decay and resets.
• Advanced Features: Using AI-powered scoring and performance monitoring if you’re on HubSpot’s Enterprise plan.

Next Steps

Now it’s time to put everything into action.

Feeling overwhelmed?  That’s ok–we got you! We’re experts in setting up lead scoring in HubSpot (among many other things) and can get you rolling on day 1–check it out 👇