A Guide to HubSpot Lead Scoring | ThinkFuel | HubSpot Partner

Do you need to implement HubSpot lead scoring?

In short—yes. 

It’s been reported that 68 percent of “highly effective and efficient” marketers give credit to lead scoring as one of their top revenue contributors. What’s more? Seventy percent of leads are lost because of sales teams’ poor follow-up. 

Lead scoring can have a major impact on your entire business-to-business (B2B) brand, especially the way you nurture leads and guide them through your sales funnel. Here’s how. 

What Is Lead Scoring—And Why Does It Matter?

Lead scoring is a precise way to qualify leads who express interest in your company. What does this mean?

You can use lead scoring in HubSpot to give numerical values—or points—to score every lead that comes through your business’s website. Within HubSpot, you can score your leads based on a range of attributes (like the professional information and demographics they volunteer), as well as all of the ways they engage in your website and your social media platforms, the pages they click on your website, the webinars they sign up for, and more. 

Essentially, lead scoring ranks your customers using your own predetermined criteria to understand which leads aren’t a great fit for your B2B business, which ones need some nurturing, and which ones are ready to purchase your products or services—all by awarding each lead a number of points.

Why is this important? Your sales and marketing teams can use this information to determine which leads to prioritize and how to best serve them. This can help you convert more leads into customers.

Of course you want to generate a large number of leads. However, when you have more leads, you have to be more discerning about which leads deserve more of your team’s focus. This can help your sales and marketing teams work better together. 

Sometimes, sales teams can get frustrated with marketing teams if they offer irrelevant leads and vice versa. Marketing teams can get impatient if they feel sales teams aren’t making progress based on the leads they deliver. It’s the perfect situation for conflict to arise. 

Why does lead scoring matter? Because it works. It helps eliminate this potential friction in your team. Here’s what lead scoring can do for you:

• Make better use of your valuable time and resources
• Provide more accurate buyer personas as you work to understand each buyer’s journey
• Develop improved relationships with leads and potential buyers
• Give you and your team a simpler, more streamlined lead evaluation process

With lead scoring systems, marketing and sales teams can better discern exactly which leads to focus on and can work together more efficiently. Lead scores give both groups better tools to generate a more successful outcome for every marketing endeavor since your entire team knows which brand meets the criteria of a valuable lead. 

About Lead Scoring Models

Most lead scoring models are created to help you maximize the potential of your lead database and find the lead brands that are most compatible with your products and services. 

Often, lead score points range from 0 to 100, but you can adjust your model to best identify customers who fit the attributes you are seeking in a core customer. What kind of scoring models can you set up? There are several from which to choose:

• Demographics, which can help pinpoint brands that fall within a particular geographical location, job title, budget, goals, timeline, industry, and other information used to find your target audience.

• Company information, which is useful in identifying businesses that fit a certain type, size, or industry. You can add or subtract points to narrow your field of leads so your sales team can connect with the right brands. 

• Online behavior, which can help your teams better understand what kinds of problems each lead is hoping to solve, who is visiting your website, the page viewed, if they are investigating high-value pages (like product pages, pricing pages, or contact us pages) or downloading gated content, if they subscribe to your blog or submit a form, how interested they are in working with your brand, and more. 

• Email engagement, which gives you a better picture of which email subscribers actually open your emails or click through to your website, who views offer promotion emails, and more. 

• Social media engagement, which demonstrates which leads are interacting with your brand, retweeting or sharing posts, visiting your page, and more. 

• Spam, which helps you spot the leads that fill your form fields with nonsense replies or provide Gmail or Yahoo email addresses instead of addresses tied to a specific business. 

So, which of these factors matter the most to your B2B business? How can you score criteria to find leads that are a good fit? There are a few things you can do:

• Connect with your sales team and find out what content they share with leads to help close on a sale, what information they find most helpful, what kinds of leads don’t pan out, and what helps them convert leads to customers.
• Talk to your current customers about what was helpful for them when they were making their personal buying decision. Be sure to connect with customers who have both long and short trips through your sales funnel. 
• Use HubSpot’s analytical tools to determine which marketing efforts are the most effective in converting visitors into leads and leads into visitors, how much revenue came from each marketing effort, and where each marketing effort generally falls in the conversion journey. 

What Should Determine Your Lead Score?

Lead scoring isn’t just a fancy tool to rank potential customers; it’s a way to automate the process of determining which leads to pursue and where they are in their buying journey. All of the criteria you set up for your lead scoring system can be broken down into three separate categories:

• Whether the lead (and their business) fits your buyer persona
• How much interest a lead has shown in your brand
• Where your lead is in their buying journey; which stage they are in

This can help you gain a deeper understanding of each individual sales process; if your leads are brand new and looking for more information from your company or if they are ready to make a purchase. Your management team can tailor their approach to meet each lead where they are. And? It can help you conserve your time and resources for your most qualified leads.

Lead scoring gives you a helpful, relative, objective scale to understand each lead’s potential value to your business. Marketing guru Neil Patel put it best when he shared that, “The biggest brands in the world understand one simple truth: Not all leads are created equal.” He also mentioned that:

• 47 percent of B2B marketers reported that lead scoring was effective
• 54 percent of B2B marketers stated that predictive lead scoring was effective

Set Up HubSpot Lead Scoring

Both Professional and Enterprise users have the power to customize their lead scoring models, including the default contact property within their HubSpot account. You can set your HubSpot lead scoring model to continuously adjust point values based on a lead’s actions, demographics, and more. Points can be added for criteria set in the Positive section or removed if they no longer meet these criteria, and points can be removed for criteria set in the Negative section, or conversely added back if circumstances change. 

One benefit of HubSpot lead scoring? If a particular criterion is removed, every lead record is re-evaluated so each score is always up-to-date based on your evolving needs.

How do you go about customizing and setting up the criteria for your HubSpot lead score?

1. Within your HubSpot account, click on the Settings icon in the main navigation bar.
2. Click on Properties in the left sidebar menu.
3. By scrolling or searching, select HubSpot Score or Custom Score Property, then click on the Property Name you wish to modify.
4. Click Add criteria in either the Positive or Negative section to establish whether you want your new criteria category to add or remove points from each lead’s score. 
5. Establish your criteria, then hit the Apply filter button. 
6. If you wish to add additional criteria to your lead scoring set, click AND to establish that you want potential leads to meet all the criteria for a score to apply. 
7. Click the Add criteria button again to add separate criteria for lead scoring.
8. If you wish to change the number of points that are added or removed when a lead meets a particular criterion, select the Edit icon. Enter your new Score Amount, then select Set. 

Once you begin to establish your lead scoring system, you can also:

• Clone a set of criteria for a new lead scoring campaign
• Delete a set of criteria when it is no longer relevant to your needs
• Add as many as 100 filters to each score property
• Use your score properties to segment lists and even enroll records into specific workflows
• Sync your HubSpot leads in Salesforce based on their HubSpot score

Use Lead Scoring to Generate More Quality Leads

Every B2B brand wants better leads—and more of them. HubSpot lead scoring can help you cut down on wasted time while driving conversions. 

The issue? In a modern marketing culture, there are many different kinds of lead generators and countless traffic sources. A lead scoring app can help spot the most important components of strong prospective leads. 

As a B2B brand, navigating your lead scoring system can be challenging—even with a user-friendly tool like Hubspot. ThinkFuel Marketing has a broad range of experience guiding B2B brands through HubSpot lead scoring, inbound marketing strategies, and more. To discover how we can help your B2B company, connect with our team today.