Complete Guide to HubSpot Lead Scoring: Best Practices & More

HubSpot lead scoring is more of an art versus a science.

If you've just started using HubSpot's CRM software and stumbled across their lead scoring tool, you might be wondering if you should use it, and if so, how. 

Here's the good news: HubSpot's lead scoring system is easy enough to turn on and off. 

The harder part is building out a lead scoring strategy that fits well to your own goals and your company's goals. 

Our guide will walk you through both the easy part of how to start with HubSpot lead scoring, and the harder part of how to build a winning lead scoring strategy. 

What is Lead Scoring

Before we get into the details on how to build out a lead scoring system using HubSpot, let’s define some high-level terms. 

Lead scoring is how you can prioritize what leads matter the most to your team. You do this by using a set of scoring criteria to determine how likely your lead is to convert based on your ideal customer profile (ICP). 

Leads are commonly broken down into qualifying stages based on what channel they converted through or how often they engaged with your product. A user who converted through marketing channels, for example, would be an MQL (marketing qualified lead), whereas a user who converted via your sales team would be an SQL (sales qualified lead). 

A good lead scoring system is the difference between wasting your time on a low quality lead and converting users that are ready to make the buy. 

Lead scoring tips

When building out your lead scoring strategy, keep the following three questions in mind: 

1. Who is your ICP? Get an idea of who the ideal customer is for your service or product. Speaking to your sales team is always a good idea. This will determine how you establish your lead scoring criteria. 
2. What are your negative attributes? HubSpot’s lead scoring tool has positive and negative attributes. Negative attributes are points that are removed from a user’s score if the user does not meet certain criteria (ex: company size, industry). 
3. What are your positive attributes? On the other hand, positive attributes are points added to a user’s score if the user fits your ICP. 

Unfortunately, building a lead score in HubSpot is a bit more complicated than setting an ICP and implementing your negative and positive aspects. Read on to learn how you can optimize your lead scoring strategy to its full potential. 

How to Build a HubSpot Lead Scoring Strategy

One of the advantages of having HubSpot is its relatively easy lead scoring implementation. HubSpot Lead Scoring, while having a heap of issues, does not suffer from ease-of-access. That includes lead scoring in HubSpot.

In other words, setting up lead scoring in HubSpot is the easy part. The hard part is making a strategic decision to use data to determine your lead flow.

Like the wind on a blustery day or a car horn in the distance— lead scoring is really a way to focus your attention. Is this lead good? Is it garbage?

Lead scoring isn’t always an exact, “dialed-in” method but more of a wait-and-see method. This is especially true in a few situations:

• You’re still working on figuring out who your customers are. If you’re still not sure you have a strong vision of your ideal customer profile, lead scoring, whether you’re doing so in HubSpot or not, might be challenging.
• Data Quality. I’ve seen several times when a client cites the number of HubSpot contacts they have versus the quality of data. Sure, you might have 100,000 contacts, but do you have the data necessary to build relevant lists and automations to make your marketing effective?
• You don’t have many closed won deals. The heart of optimization for lead scoring is simply basic pattern recognition: if most of your closed won deals involve people with a certain job title, well, just market to people with that job title.

How often should I update my lead scoring strategy

Any lead scoring system is a testament to continual improvement. While your organization may seem the same, there are trends, business models, and culture that continue to evolve. 

Just when you think you have your HubSpot lead score dialed-in, the market norm and perspective will change. Whether it’s systemic and aggregate, like a new business model, or as minute as a platform change, your targets require dedication to stay relevant.

How Does HubSpot’s Lead Scoring Work - Strengths & Weaknesses

If you read here, you’ll know that I wrote a post outlining the things that are great, and not so great, with HubSpot lead scoring. Granted, every system has its own unique take on lead scoring and what metrics it deems important, but I’d characterize the two things you need to know at least with HubSpot:

1. HubSpot lead scoring is great when it comes to field data. Any data that exists in a field is golden for HubSpot. Everything from geography to location, if you know a standard attribute, can be handled with lead scoring.
2. HubSpot engagement metrics are almost non-existent in a way that’s useful. Calculated fields are limited to only 5 on anything other than an enterprise-level account, so it can be hard to really get a sense of your engagement metrics with the platform.

So, with those two pain-points in context, know that while HubSpot lead scoring (also called HubSpot score) lets you technically lead score—it has some massive limitations around engagement metrics.

It’s for sure not all doom and gloom. HubSpot does include some metrics related to engagement (e.g. how many emails opened or how many recorded page views).

The issue is always time. HubSpot has no component that discounts time. After all, that’s great that a contact has 16 pageviews, but maybe those pageviews occur two years ago. See where we’re going with this?

More than any magic formula designed to let you pinpoint your most perfect leads, I’ll say this: use past data to predict your future.

How to Use HubSpot Deals for Lead Scoring

HubSpot deals are a great example of using past data as a lead scoring model for future outcomes. Closed won HubSpot deals are one of the most critical KPIs for companies because it directly impacts revenue.

If you want to qualify leads quickly—start with looking at the attributes of who is participating in those deals. Some really good fields that could be relevant for your organization include:

• Job Titles. Titles relate to job function (which might overlap with whatever you’re selling).
• Geography. Some businesses offer more services or deliver those services in a specific state or geography.
• Pageviews. If you want to know what someone is thinking about—look at their pageviews. The only reason you’d be reading this blog post is if you’re interested in HubSpot lead scoring (and thus stands to reason you might either work in HubSpot or have HubSpot).

Your goal for using past data projects how possible leads can be validated in the future.

Let’s work with some fake data as an example.

HubSpot Deals & Lead Scoring Example

Let’s pretend that these were your creme-de-la-creme deals—the ones that either represented the most revenue or were close to some other goal that’s important to you.

I say this because it isn’t always sheer revenue that matters the most to organizations, but many different aspects of offers, products, price points, and more.

The methodology is still the same: your goal is to look at the attributes of contacts within these deals and use that as the basis of your lead scoring.

If you tend to have a lot of deals with contacts who have a job title of “marketing director”, it stands to reason that you grade new leads higher via lead scoring (since those historically have represented some percentage of your closed won deals).

In the example above, you might have a business that depends on the geographic location of your contact.

The attributes of these contacts within your deals are the basis of your lead scoring.

While we’ve discussed contact attributes, you could 100% do the same process for companies or within deals:

• For Deals, use: New or Existing Business. Product Type. Product
• For Companies, try: Company Size, Budget, Headquarters Location

Pro Tip: Retroactively Add Data for Better HubSpot Lead Scoring

One powerful, albeit time-consuming, method is to retroactively add data to your past deals, companies, and contacts.

Let’s say you started trying to categorize the type of companies that work with your business. This may be an effort you recently started—meaning that the data would only exist for companies going forward.

Instead, you can retroactively sort through your old contacts, companies, and deals to create that new data point (perhaps this is simply called “Company Type”).

The good news is that while adding data to new deals isn’t retroactive: most of HubSpot lead scoring is.

As long as you have a rule setup for evaluating a certain metric — HubSpot will score that lead as soon as the data is available.

What HubSpot Engagement Metrics Matter to Lead Scoring

The assumption with most lead scoring systems is that you have the data already or you know most of your contacts. There are too many reasons to list for why that data might not exist.

Essentially, other metrics exist in HubSpot that are ultimately unique to every contact and those are engagement metrics. Some examples include:

• Pageviews. Critically revealing of what users are actively considering or researching on your site.
• Email Opens, Clicks. Subject lines tightly tied to particular products can be especially revealing in terms of which contacts might be interested in particular products or services.
• Form Submissions. Form submissions are an entire discussion within themselves, but they are a particularly powerful, intent-driven signal that you can tap into to score leads
• Chatflows. Whether we’re using Intercom or HubSpot’s built in chatbot, chat interactions are like long-form, well, forms that can tell you critical details about your users.

Again, time is the biggest caveat to using these metrics since, usually, we want to see that these actions have been taken (e.g. an email open or form submission) within recent history versus sometime last year.

There are some metrics better than others that can mostly get you the data you want:

1. Pageviews x Recent Engagement Date. These are two default fields in HubSpot that let you see contacts with both high numbers of pageviews (again not a perfect metric) along with their recent engagement date — a field that’s updated with their latest interaction (email open, meeting scheduled, etc).
2. Likelihood to Close. This is a really useful metric that indicates the probability of a contact to close within the next 90 days. Unfortunately, this is only available on enterprise-level HubSpot products.
3. Recent Form Conversion Rate. Put your finger on the pulse of recent contacts who have interacted with your brand and use recent form submissions.

Optimize HubSpot Lead Scoring Like a Pro

Lead scoring in HubSpot is designed to be an ongoing process—not a one-off quick fix. We remind our clients that lead scoring is often the starting point for a much larger conversation on how your organization or company responds to leads.

In other words, lead scoring in any system is designed as a rough sign post—another data point that allows for better lead flow. More importantly, lead scoring is designed to represent your ideal customer profile and to prevent anything from slipping through the cracks.

If you haven’t already, check out my other article on how to hack HubSpot lead scoring for more in-depth detail on other nuances specific to HubSpot.

Optimizing your HubSpot lead scoring to its full potential is the difference between getting leads and converting them. Still have more questions and need some HubSpot help? We gotcha! Reach out for a free consultation call so you can get started optimizing your HubSpot today.