When every lead goes to sales, the team spends the day on people who won’t buy and is slow to reach those who are ready. When none do, marketing becomes a contact dump. Lead scoring is the rule that settles that middle ground: a score showing how close each person is to buying.

The two axes of scoring

Profile answers whether the lead looks like your ideal customer: industry, size, role, revenue, region. Behavior answers whether they’re showing interest: asked for a quote, visited the pricing page, opened emails, came back to the site several times.

A lead with a perfect profile and no interest isn’t ready yet. A very interested lead outside the profile can eat up the team’s time without turning into a sale. What matters is the combination of the two.

How to set the weights for your business

1. Look at who has already bought

   List your latest closed customers and what they had in common before buying: industry, size, pages visited, time to close.

2. Start with few criteria

   Five to eight well-chosen criteria work better than thirty weights nobody understands.

3. Set the bands with sales

   The cut-off for “sales now” needs to be agreed with whoever will handle the leads. If the team complains about cold leads, the cut-off is too low.

4. Include negative points

   Disqualifying criteria — unserved region, competitor, student — stop click volume from inflating the score.

5. Review every quarter

   Compare scores with closed deals. Criteria that don’t distinguish buyers should lose weight.

Where lead scoring lives

The score needs to live where sales works: in the CRM. Automation tools like RD Station, HubSpot and Brevo let you score by profile and behavior and trigger actions when the lead crosses a band — create a task, send an alert or change the funnel stage.

Full example: scoring three real leads

With the simulator weights above, see how three different leads would follow different paths:

Notice that the second and third leads aren’t discarded: they keep receiving content and can change band at any interaction. Scoring doesn’t decide who is worth it, but when it’s worth sales joining the conversation.

Profile scoring vs behavior scoring

• Profile is usually provided once, in the form or through data enrichment, and changes little. It answers whether that contact could be a customer.
• Behavior changes all the time and answers whether the contact is interested now. That’s why it should lose strength over time: a click from three months ago doesn’t mean the same as a click from yesterday.

A useful practice is to apply decay to behavior points — reducing or zeroing the score of old interactions — so the score reflects where the lead is now.

How to check that scoring is working

1. Compare scores with sales

   After a few weeks, look at each band’s close rate. The top band needs to close much better than the others.

2. Listen to sales

   If the team complains about cold leads in the hot band, raise the cut-off or review the behavior weights.

3. Look for criteria that don’t differentiate

   A criterion present in both buyers and non-buyers is just inflating the score.

4. Adjust in cycles

   Change a few weights at a time and track the effect for at least one sales cycle.

Defining the scoring rules is one of the deliverables of the flowchart approval step in Manáry’s automation onboarding.

Frequently asked questions