Top 18 Lead Scoring Best Practices From Sales Experts

“The first step in scoring leads is ensuring you have your ideal customer profile (ICP) well defined. You should have 4-5 attribute-related metrics — maybe it's company size, company revenue, geography, or vertical or industry. This is the foundation of your lead scoring methodology, and the ICP should be tiered out based on who is best served by your product. You can then combine your ICP model with behavioral insights of the lead (how often are they engaging, what type of content are they engaging with, etc.) to help you understand what the ultimate score should be for a particular lead.”

— Nick Turner, Antenna

“When scoring leads, first consider how much time and effort it will take to convert them into customers. Second, think about how long it will take your business to recover the costs associated with making them a customer. Finally, rely on your instincts — if it feels like a good lead, then it probably is!”

— Staci Holweger, LifePatches.co

“Before you officially create your point system, creating a threshold value is crucial for scoring. When it’s reached, it indicates that the lead should move forward. One of the most important lead scoring methodologies is having a scoring threshold to guarantee that only eligible leads are passed along to representatives. Clearly stated criteria eliminates ambiguity and improves your scoring system.”

— Andy Golpys, MadeByShape

“Leads will amass a number of behavior points over time. Know that some of them might not have any intention of buying — for instance, while a freelancer won't invest in sophisticated marketing automation technology, they might still read your blog. A medical student won't go to your website for your equipment because they need it; they'll visit it for research purposes only. Your competitors are curious about what you're doing and might drop by frequently.”

— Richard Lubicky, RealPeopleSearch

“In some scenarios, while our clients waited for their lead scores to rise, they lost the opportunity with the decision maker, who said, "We just signed a new contract last week!" Your competitors want that deal, too — you aren't the only company tracking their intent. Don't lose deals by being a slave to arbitrary numbers; reach out early if you think they could be a great lead.”

— Carrie Simpson, Managed Sales Pros

“Utilizing a qualifying method like CHAMP paired with strong sales training for your team is a great way to ensure consistency and effectiveness when lead scoring. CHAMP qualifying is when your sales team uncovers the challenges (CH), authority or decision-making power (A), money (M), and priorities (P) of their prospects. A framework like this can foster consistency in your sales team’s scoring results.”

— Angelo Argentieri, AKA Search Group

“If you want to increase your lead score, you should make it a joint marketing and sales effort. The marketing and sales teams should collaborate, and both should agree on the metrics to track and attribute scores to. In the early stages of the project, you can provide insight to the marketing team by being closer to the customer.”

— Nick Yu, Beadnova

“Some criteria I'll take into account are events attended and pages visited. Online event organisation has become an essential part of marketing, so I'll add points to event attendees’ overall lead score. When a lead visits our website, I’ll analyse how many pages they visit and account for that in their score. We’ve found that these are two great indicators of who could turn into a customer.”

— David Reid, VEM Tooling 

“Demographic information, such as location, age, gender, and more, can be helpful when scoring leads. This is because certain demographics are more likely to be interested in certain products or services. For example, if you sell ski equipment, you may want to score leads from cold-weather states more highly than leads from warm-weather states.”

— Joe Giranda, CFR Classic

“When working across a variety of markets worldwide, you need to tailor your lead scoring criteria to the markets in question. For example, I’ve used different criteria at times for Mainland China vs Vietnam, or for France vs Germany or the USA simply because there are variations in the buyers’ preferred journey. This is complex to manage within a CRM, especially as it’s not a ‘set and forget’ exercise and the customer journey evolves in different ways and at different speeds for each market. Within a large country such as the US, this can also apply to regions, as New York and California may require subtle differences in scoring.”

— Kathryn Read, Kathryn Read

"Consider what shows that a lead is most interested in what you're selling. Are they opening your emails (low intent)? Are they clicking links in your emails (high intent)? Are they visiting your website and spending a good amount of time on your website (very high intent)? Are they browsing multiple pages on your website? The higher the intent of an activity from a lead, the higher the weight for that activity and score for the lead.” 

— Amit Sarda, Amit Sarda

“Subtract points for characteristics or actions that indicate a bad fit. If you exclusively sell to a specific geographic area, you could assign a poor rating to any leads that fall outside of the appropriate city, county, postal code, nation, and so on. If a lead stops accessing your site or collecting your offerings, they may no longer be enthusiastic about your product or service. For this reason, deduct points from leads who have stopped connecting with your site after a certain period of time.”

— Christine Brownstein, Palaleather

“Check if your lead is interacting with your business on social media. This is a fantastic technique to determine how interested they are in the products and services offered by your business. If your lead is active on social media and frequently posts, now is a great time to engage in a more open, casual dialogue with them to establish rapport and trust.”

— Corey Tyner, Buy Yo Dirt

“A strong lead scoring model’s guiding principle is ‘create it and refine it,’ not ‘set it and forget it.’ Update your scoring procedures often depending on the most recent client data to keep your lead scoring model as accurate as possible. For instance, the lead scoring threshold is probably too low if a large number of leads are qualified by marketing but only a small number are converted by sales. You might also need to adjust how you weigh those factors.”

— Jack Sobel, RMBH Charities

“A tactic that can help you score leads more effectively is to use software designed specifically to help with lead scoring. This type of software can automate the process of scoring leads and provide you with more accurate results. Additionally, it can help you keep track of your lead scoring progress over time so you can see which leads are improving and which ones are falling behind.”

— Meyr Aviv, iMoving

“AI tools use machine-based algorithms to sort and prioritize leads using patterns from behavioral data. Lead scoring comes down to fit and intent — meaning how well your product suits the needs of an individual user and how likely they are to purchase your product at a specific time. By exposing AI systems to large amounts of data concerning user interactions with your website, machine learning can identify patterns often missed by sales teams. And the more AI understands when, how, and why users interact with your website, the more accurate predictive lead scoring becomes for your team.”

— Chris Gadek, AdQuick

“There are great lead scoring tools that can integrate with your email and help you prioritize and follow up with your hottest leads. For example, LeadGnome automatically scores leads based on their engagement with the emails you send them, and it offers a range of other features to help you streamline your sales process.”

— Martin Seeley, Mattress Next Day

“I like to use a spreadsheet with columns and formulas for each of the criteria that makes up my ideal client. Then I can just score each lead based on how well they match up with those criteria. The key is making sure you have enough information available to make an accurate judgment call — if you don't, you'll end up wasting time on leads that aren't a good fit.”

— Rengie Wisper, Ever Wallpaper