Lead scoring software

Fit scoring and behavioural scoring are different things

Fit scoring asks whether this person is the kind of customer you want; behavioural scoring asks how interested they appear to be. Blending them into one number hides which question you answered.

A prospect who opened six emails and sat through a webinar can score highly on behaviour while being a poor fit. Marketing automation tools tend to score behaviour because behaviour is what they can observe. An assessment scores fit, because it asks directly.

If you want both, keep them as two numbers. A single blended score is the kind of metric that looks sophisticated and cannot be acted on, because a high one does not tell you which half it came from.

How to choose points without guessing

Start from customers you already have: take your five best and five worst, and set the points so the scoring would have separated them.

This is more reliable than reasoning forward from criteria, because it tests the scoring against outcomes you can already see. If your proposed weights score a current bad-fit customer as qualified, the weights are wrong — and you have learned that in an afternoon instead of a quarter.

• List your five best and five worst customers
• Answer the assessment the way each of them would have
• Adjust points and weights until the two groups separate cleanly
• Put the threshold between them, not at a round number

Why category weights matter more than individual points

Weights decide which category can overrule the others, and that is usually a bigger lever than any single answer's points.

If budget is weighted at twice everything else, a prospect cannot compensate for having none by answering every other question well — which is normally the behaviour you want. Scoring without weights implicitly claims every category matters equally, and that is almost never true.

Common questions

How does lead scoring work?

Each possible answer carries points, each category of questions carries a weight, the weighted points are totalled, and the total is compared against a threshold that defines what qualified means. Read more →

What is a good lead score threshold?

There is no universal number, and the right one is wherever your own best and worst customers separate when you score them retrospectively. Read more →