Three Ways to Make Your Lead Scoring Smarter

Alan Perlman

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Exciting news, folks.

We recently added Smart Lead Scoring in all Contacts-enabled HubSpot portals. You can now set up a custom lead score based on any data in the contact record. We want to make it as easy as possible to identify your best leads.

Read on to learn three quick, simple strategies you can use to score contacts today.

Let your best leads rise to the top!

How to Access and Use Smart Lead Scoring

You can access Smart Lead Scoring by hopping into Contacts.

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Click Manage Settings.

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Then, on the left, look for the Custom Lead Scoring.

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Here, you can set up your scoring parameters based on various criteria.

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1. Add Points for "Intent to Buy"

You can score based on Analytics data like first page seen, referring website, or referring keyword.

  • Add points to contacts if they initially found your site by searching for a keyword that you know signals an intent to buy.
  • Add points for contacts that are referred from high quality websites, like partner distributors.
  • Add points for your "bottom of the funnel" offers, like talk to sales or get a quote.

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2. Add Points for Highly Engaged Contacts

You can score on engagement metrics to view your most engaged contacts.

  • Score on number of visits to the site 
  • Score on number of emails clicked
  • Score on number of forms submitted
  • Use time last seen to score recently engaged contacts.

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3. Add Points for Target Persona Matches

You spent a lot of time defining your target persona - when a contact is a great match for you, give them a higher score.

  • Add points for specific job titles or roles, like director or manager
  • Add points when a contact comes from a specific company (example: @hubspot.com email address)
  • Add points when a contact fills out a targeted persona-specific offer
  • Add points when a contact comes to your site from a social media network that you know sends leads and customers your way, like LinkedIn

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*Bonus Tip: Subtract Points for Email Types

Are you a B2B company? You can subtract points if a lead’s email address ends in something like @hotmail.com.

Competitors downloading lots of stuff from your site? You can subtract points for their email addresses, @thecompetitor.com.

What Do I Do with the Lead Score?

After you create your scoring criteria, determine what an appropriate range is for your priority contacts. Are you scoring on a scale? What ranges indicate highly valuable contacts? 50-75? 75-100? 150-200?

This is where it gets fun.

With your range in mind, build a prioritized list of highly engaged leads to follow up with based on their HubSpot score.

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These are the leads sales needs to see. If you want to take this a step further and happen to be integrated with Salesforce, you can set this up to where only the contacts that meet a certain threshold are passed through to Salesforce. Additionaly, you can also create custom assignment rulesPretty nifty.

Also, think about marketing to contacts differently based on their HubSpot score. To contacts with a lower score, send top of the funnel content like whitepapers and eBooks that are less sales-focused.

Do you use Custom Lead Scoring? Any strategies that have worked for your particular company?

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