The Connective

Understanding Lead Scoring in Marketing

Written by Bradley Michel | Jun 20, 2025 7:47:19 AM

 

Transcript

Hi, I'm Andrew Turner from Cogent Connective, and, what we're going to take a look at just now is, we're going to have a look at lead scoring. so, without any further ado, we'll go through to marketing and select lead scoring. And so, lead scoring is one of these really interesting areas, something that a lot of people have a lot of interest in. So, with lead scoring, there's two ways of undertaking it. Lead scoring, well actually there's three, but this, I'm going to be looking at this mainly from a professional setup rather than an enterprise setup. So, with lead scoring in HubSpot, you are able to measure engagement, and you're also able to measure, fit of a company to, the services that your company provides. And engagement can be the engagement of, contact at various levels, various stages of the of the funnel.

And I thoroughly recommend one area that you should look at, with, lead scoring is, really having in mind what you want to achieve with lead scoring. so, what you can find with lead scoring is that, you know, you, you already get, forms that are submitted which are, dealt with as a matter of urgency but lead scoring from an engagement perspective early on can provide you with opportunities to re-engage previous contacts and to identify people who are on your database who are showing more interest in your business. It's also useful, lead scoring can be used, as a means of, prioritising if you have high volumes of leads coming through, being able to prioritise those leads and being able to identify, more easily, at the deal stage, whether you have a high, those that are fully engaged with the deal stage or those that are responding regularly to the information that you're providing, compared to those that aren't, aren't responding regularly.

And it'll give you the opportunity to try to take, maybe more direct action to try to re-engage those that are, that are not engaged and or otherwise prioritise those that are maybe more engaged. so having an idea as to what you want to achieve with your lead scoring is essential really at the early stages. So, there's two ways to create a lead score, probably one that most people are going to use is going to be the manual approach, but we're going to have a quick look at the AI approach. Now, we're not going to be able to take this all the way through because I'm just using a developer account at the moment, which has got no data in it. but one of the things that you're going to need with AI when you go to create a, an engagement score or even a fit score with the scoring is a lot of data, for AI to look to see, what's happened in the past and what sort of engagements have led from one stage to another. So, as you can see here, this is how lead scoring is set up in AI.

So, you give it a name, but then you look at the stages, that you want to move someone from and to. So, as I said earlier on, having, a very defined, understanding of what you want to achieve with your lead score is really key. and in this one, which is the default that is set up, it's looking at, generating or starting point being a lead coming in and then moving that lead through to becoming sales qualified. Now obviously a lead isn’t usually a new element of a new piece of data coming in or a new contact coming into HubSpot. It asks you to look at a time frame, and then when you go to create the score, what, HubSpot does is it goes and has a look at all of the data that you've collected that have moved between those stages. And I just click OK, and it's going to tell me that there's a problem because we haven't got any data, and that's fine.

So, what it does is it looks at the data that you have, and how it's gone through those stages. One of the interesting things is that if you're going to be looking at running, using the AI to be able to identify and be able to prioritise those that are at the deal stage, then obviously one of the things that you'll need to do, which maybe some, some companies don't use as frequently as others, is actually using deals and, fastidiously using deals, and leads to, build that data so that HubSpot can see all of the engagements that are happening at those stages. So, I'll exit out of here and what we're going to do then is because we can't create an AI, engagement score, we'll go and create a standard manual engagement score and we'll look at all the options that are available in there. So, we're going to be doing this for contacts, although even if you're under companies, you can look at, engagement score based on companies, which, looks at all of those associated contacts within the company, and scores based on all of them, all of those associated contacts and the level of engagement you're getting on a company-wide basis, which can be really useful. But for now, we're just going to have a look at contacts. And we'll go and create our lead score.

Okay, so, this is it, not much to see to begin with, so, we'll give it a name, and I'm going to be very creative here and we'll call it a new engagement lead score. There we go. And we will add an event, an event group. Now, one of the things, that is usually fairly key to lead scoring is looking at website engagement. so that's going to be our starting point and there we go. We have web events, and we'll look at pages visited. So just as we start this, there's a few things to point out. You have an option up here, although in professional versions you don't really get this option, but you can actually do set your score limit. so, we'll stick with a hundred points, which is the standard in, in marketing professional. And then what you do is you can create different groups. So, let's say we based our first one on web events and we'll call this our web scoring group. And we'll call this one our form scoring group. There we go.

So, then you get to split your 100 points between these two. So, let's say that internet engagement is important, but possibly not quite as important as someone submitting forms, so we'll give that 40 points out of 100. And we'll give this one 60. And what we can look at here as well, there's two points, around decay. if someone goes and looks at a number of, pages on your website, and then they do nothing for several months, then, you don't want to keep coming across them as being a high performing, or high-scoring contact and so there's two approaches that HubSpot has to decaying those points. there's using the decay scores, and you can look at choosing a percentage over a given number of months. So, we could say, over one month, given that it's web, and, and if no one's coming back after, after a month, then, you know, let's say that that probably means that, they're not a very hot lead.

So, we'll de- decay the whole thing by, 100% over one month. Another way of looking at it, I'll turn this off, is to add a time frame. So, you can look at how many times I've looked at paper. Pages over the last, yeah, let's do it over seven days. So, it can actually add an extra level of immediacy, to, things like, web, webpages. One of the things you can do with webpages, which is quite interesting, and a lot of websites are, structured, to show that, not all pages are as valuable as each other. so, people who have gone to visit a contact us page may well be very important people have gone to look at pricing a very important people have looked at pricing lots of times are really important, if someone's gone and found a blog article, it's important, but maybe not quite as important as the others. So, you can, you can filter your pages. we'll look at our URL path and, we can, look at contains any of, let's say, so look at any of your blog articles, and we'll give them, let's say we'll give them two points. we'll add another one, pages visited, and we'll look at those that looked at pricing, for example. And there's a whole load of areas that you can take a look at here. We’ll just go to URL path, then to any of, slash pricing. And you may want to give them ten points. And again, we'll add a time frame to this.

Maybe we want to make that a bit more urgent. if someone's going to look at pricing in the last three days, maybe we'll give them even more points, maybe we'll give them 30 points. and so, you can start to build scores based on different ways in which people have engaged with your website. We can look at building scores based on different ways in which people have engaged with forms. So, we'll go and look at form criteria. but there's a whole range of things here. Yeah, how people, people have engaged with marketing emails, sales emails, sequences, certain tasks that have been undertaken such as calls. so, what you can do is start to build a picture of or build a number of different engagement scores, that, can optimize or show how people are performing for different particular of things, very much as we were saying earlier on. So, we're just going to have a look at the options around forms here to give you an example. So here you can look at whether they've looked at a pop-up, whether they've interacted with a form but not submitted, or whether they've actually submitted a form.

I'd probably look at interaction personally, form submissions tend to generate in many respects, they could generate, their own leads straight away anyway, unless of course you've got hero content that you're using such as you know a how-to guide which might not generate necessarily a lead but it may generate maybe 10 points worth of lead scoring and if you've got people, you are looking at a how-to guide or they're looking at a brochure, then that along with other things may be enough to generate, someone into a contact into an MQL for example. And again, you can filter by the different types of, look at some of the events here, you can filter by the different types of form, content name, content type, form name, there we go, so you can make it has defined as you as you want to make it really. So, you can build out these, these, lead scoring, it's engagement lead scoring, and there's a few other elements that you can also take a look at that can, be really useful. I'm just going to look at this one here which is contacts. it doesn't have to be the case that you apply your lead scoring to absolutely every contact in your database.

What you could do is build lists, so let's say for example that you're an organization that works with builders, but they also work with architects, there may be, those routes that are taken by builders are very different to the sorts of routes that are taken by architects because they have different roles within the, within the process. So, what you could do is you could, build two different engagement scores for, one for builders and one for architects and apply them too different lists that you've made, to identify by builders and architects within you’re, the other thing here is settings. We can edit the details here. And you've got score values where you get your property label and you can use, the properties. So, this is an important thing worth mentioning, that within, lead scoring, it creates a property for every lead score that you do, that enables you to then be able to run things like workflows, which will enable you to do things like allocating. Leads, moving, leads between different life cycle stages, setting tasks, pushing contacts into sequences. and another thing that's actually, actually I'll come back to that just to, whilst we're still here, we'll look at different thresholds as well.

So, you can actually colour code your contacts so that it's much easier for, salespeople to go and take a look and find those that maybe haven't become a lead yet but look at those most likely to. But just to go back to these criteria one thing that I didn't mention which is quite important is I've been assuming that you want to add points but there may be situations where you want to take them away because, someone's undertaken negative lead scoring, so, there are things like unsubscribing, or maybe other elements where they've gone to pages which maybe demonstrate that they're maybe less interested than you might expect or, identified that they're, you know, potentially, a competitor or maybe they're just there to try and sell you something rather than buy something. So, there's, you can also take points away. But another thing that you can do within those workflows is, when certain situations, become available outside of the lead scoring, you can actually, then you create a workflow to, you know, as someone becomes identified as being a competitor, for example, you can go and set a workflow that once, once that person's identified as being a competitor, the workflow makes the, sets the lead score to being zero.

One other point that's probably worth mentioning is that in the professional hub, you have access to access to five different lead scores. So, you can build five combinations of, engagement and also, fit criteria. So, I'm just going to save this now and we'll take a quick look at, fit criteria. So, exit out of there. We're going to quick, quickly We create a company wide company fit score here. And we'll go and create that. Very similar sort of situation. one thing that has changed though, an object there, which will be company. and you'll notice that, that with fit scores, that you don't have the decay feature available, so, it's more to do with, it's more to do with building a score, and, and then once an organization has got that score then it tends to keep it because it's if it's going to fit now it may well fit just as well you know in the future. So, let's have a look you've got a full list of them. Full list of company properties here, look at lead status, look at cities and location, company name, description, number of employees, industry, and a lot of this can be, data that's, actually, appended by, by HubSpot itself, particularly if you have got HubSpot creating automatically companies that associate with contacts when they come in based on their domain name.

So, we'll just put in number of employees as an example, and is greater than 20, for example. So, we'll just add that as an, as an example. And if that's the case, then we'll give them 10 points. So, this just gives you a bit of an understanding of, how you can build fit scores within your lead scoring. You can also, more, broadly here, build, membership of lists. So, if, you can actually apply this to very specific types of organizations. And you can see that falls within one scoring group. So, what you may have within this fit score is, given in the example that we had of architects, you will have an architect section and then the next property group we'll go to will be a builder section and we'll have different types of fit scores for each of those different categories. But this will still come under a single, a single score. So, it will only count as one of your five that you're, that you're allowed. So, there you go. I that's, pretty much covered everything that I wanted to talk about today. So, that's, everything, as far as lead scoring is concerned.

I hope you found that useful. And, yeah, if so, I look forward to speaking to you soon. Bye bye. Take care. Bye.