Best Practices for Lead Scoring in HubSpot

Utilizing a lead score in HubSpot will quickly help you and your team find the best leads in your system.  

I personally recommend creating two different properties for finding the best leads to suit your business in your account, first a lead grade and secondly a lead score.

What’s the difference you may ask?  Well, lead grading is more in line with firmographic data points like, Industry, Job Function, Employee Range, and Annual Revenue.  While a score I typically associate with engagement level metrics, Marketing Email Opens/Clicks, Page Views, Form Submissions, etc.

So, how do we create these?  Well, HubSpot has these nifty “Score” properties that we can utilize.  

Luckily, building a score in HubSpot is very easy.  You create a series of positive and negative attributes:

So you may be asking, how do I determine how to build my score?  Before we get started, let’s keep in mind the following:

• • You should work with members of your organization on what is a valuable lead?  Is it someone who is highly engaged with our email content, or do they come from a copy with 5,000+ employees?  By working with both sales and marketing, you can make sure the whole company is aligned around the model.
    
    
  • Consider your current customers.  When I help companies build a model, I often take the current customers and enrich them in something like Clearbit so that I can build a more accurate model. This really helps with the grading that I spoke about earlier.  But again, see how engaged your current customers are with your emails, page views, form submissions, and more.
    
    
  • Refine the model regularly, speak with your sales team when you give them a highly scored lead to see if the contact accurately reflects the score attributed to them.  

Now, let’s get to the building!  You’ll want to determine the metrics you and your team decide on and then give them a points value.  I made a starter template here which you can clone and utilize for your own team.  Do keep in mind to adjust the score where needed and assign increasing or decreasing values for better fits.

Now, you start by building your attributes to the score.  Keep in mind that you can utilize the following:

• • Contact properties
  • Company properties
  • Deal properties
  • Activity properties
  • Line item properties
  • List memberships
  • Form submissions
  • Marketing emails
  • Email subscriptions
  • Imports
  • Page views
  • Product properties
  • Workflows
  • Calls-to-action
  • Ads interactions

Just select “+ Add Criteria” then input what you have from your mapping document:

Then assign a score value:

Do keep in mind that you can make that score a negative attribute, say if a user unsubscribes from your marketing email.

After getting your scoring property build, you just need to setup a workflow to properly alert your team when a contact meets a certain threshold!  I have the following for SQLs for example:

All in all, this should get you going with a basic scoring model inside of HubSpot!