Lead scoring is a way of ranking contacts with a number based on how well they fit your ideal customer and how engaged they are. In HubSpot, a score property is calculated from rules you set, and workflows can act on it, for example by setting a contact to MQL.
A lead score combines two kinds of signal. Fit describes who the contact is: job title, company size, industry, country. Engagement describes what they do: page views, email clicks, form submissions, meetings booked. Points are added for positive signals and removed for negative ones, such as a competitor domain or months of inactivity. Depending on your subscription, HubSpot offers a score property or a dedicated lead scoring tool with separate fit and engagement scores.
The score is only useful if something happens because of it. The common pattern is a workflow that sets the lifecycle stage to MQL and assigns an owner when the score crosses a threshold. Sales views and segments can also sort by score, so reps start with the highest-ranked leads.
Scores break quietly. Rules written two years ago still award points for a webinar series that ended or a page that no longer exists. Engagement points pile up without decay, so a contact who was active once in 2023 still looks hot. And if fit properties such as industry or company size are mostly blank, the fit half of the score cannot work at all.
Treat a score as a hypothesis to test. Every quarter, compare the scores of contacts who became customers with those who did not. If they look the same, the rules are not predicting anything and should be rebuilt around the signals that did.
Lantern Software, a fictional HR platform, scored every email open. Contacts on large newsletter lists reached MQL just by opening emails. The team removed points for opens, added points for pricing page visits and demo form views, and added decay for contacts with no activity in 90 days. Sales acceptance of MQLs rose within a month.
There is no universal number, because it depends on how your points are set. Look at the scores of contacts who became customers and set the threshold where most of them sat when sales first engaged.
No. Lead scoring features depend on your subscription tier. Check what your portal includes before designing a scoring model.
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