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How to Set up Lead Scoring the Right Way on HubSpot

February 11, 2021 | 8 minute read

Moving leads from the first click to sales-ready is a joint effort between your sales and marketing teams. Your marketers create content that moves consumers through their buying journey. Your sales team closes the deals.

Though each has a specific role in the sales cycle, a collaboration between these two teams ensures your business attracts better quality leads with online content. In turn, giving your sales team contacts who are ready to purchase. Engaging content is created by knowing what your ideal customers are looking for, using information from your sales team, and also following user engagement with your website, social media and email campaigns. Using software such as HubSpot lets you follow their buyer’s journey and share the right content to get the most effective engagement from your efforts.

It’s within HubSpot too that you can identify when a lead is most likely to purchase. People who are actively engaged with your content throughout their buyer’s journey are referred to as ‘hot’ leads. Your goal is to attract and keep hot leads to make more sales and nurture loyal customers.

How Do You Determine If Your Leads Are Hot?

It’s your sales and marketing teams who determine what a hot lead is for your business, not simply a generic set of values. The goal is to create a value system using data from your past leads who became customers. What attributes did they have? Do these indicate if they’re a good fit for your product? So not only should you look internally for what a hot lead is, talk to customers who went from a hot lead to a sale (they know why they chose you, so ask them). You also want your sales and marketing teams to communicate to ensure hot lead alerts are working. Is the contact actually hot and if not, why not? Your marketing team can build on content that will score best and create more MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads).

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead Scoring is the process of assigning values also known as points to each of your business leads. The points are based on how they’ve engaged with your business online. When you look at your lead’s activity you can see pretty quickly who is actually interested and therefore likely to become sales-ready.

Once your sales and marketing teams have determined what contributes to hot lead status, the score is based on a few different attributes, the basic ones being:

The personal information they’ve submitted to you (demographics, business size, and company information). The more information they’ve given you, the more open they are to continued contact.
Behavioural data such as how they’ve engaged with your website and brand online via email and social media. Following and engaging with your business on multiple channels indicates more than a passing interest.

Using lead scoring on HubSpot is important to help prioritize outreach and close deals.

Knowing lead scores helps your sales and marketing teams prioritize their focus. Salespeople have more direction for which leads to respond to, to increase the rate they become customers. Plus, your marketers can look at where they can better target their energy to bring potential customers into the hot lead territory.

The purpose of lead scoring is to contact the potential customer at the right time with the right information to move them along the process. When they’ve reached hot lead status you want to have content ready to help them to make choices, whether it’s getting even more detailed information or contacting sales. (This is where your workflow really pays off. No scrambling for information, because the content is ready for this stage.)

By interpreting the engagement activities of leads and knowing exactly what content is getting traction, marketers can produce quality content for each stage of the buyer's journey. And deliver quality leads to the sales department. Here are some examples of how user engagement can be tracked and used to score points for quality leads.

Say your lead:

Reads a blog - you can see what type of information they’re interested in and might want more of, helping you determine which content to share with them next.
Looks at a specific webpage - product or service-specific page views let you know what leads want/need so you can show them how you can fulfil that need or solve their problem with your content.
Fills out a form - showing you they're interested enough in your offer to give permission to send them content directly gives you access to provide a more personalized sales experience.
Opens an email - actually opening something you’ve sent signals they’ve got more than a passing interest, so again, you can follow up with more helpful content, to move them even closer to being sales-ready.
Asks for a demo - they’re committing to seeing your product in action. It’s now up to your sales team to showcase your product and help buyers make a decision.

Following the types and levels of engagement and assigning leads scores can quickly produce a sales-ready client. This lets your sales team take over while your marketers continue their work attracting and engaging new clients with content.

Now that you know how your content generates quality leads, it’s important to set up lead scoring on HubSpot the right way so you’re getting an accurate picture of consumer engagement.

How Can You Set Up Your Lead Score on HubSpot?

Hubspot makes it a lot easier to use lead scoring as a sales tool than trying to figure it out on your own.

Here’s a couple of things to look for when you’re trying to determine if your lead is hot, or not.

Your existing customer relationship management (CRM) on HubSpot is a hotbed of information at a glance. Look at your contacts and decide which ones you would consider hot based on their activities. Ask yourself what these leads have done to make them stand out as good prospects for a sale within your business. Then, make note of these actions for when you’re setting up your lead scoring parameters.
Generally speaking, If the lead score is 57, or above, that contact is a hot lead. They’ve engaged with your business in ways that indicate true interest in your product or service. Now it’s time for a salesperson to reach out to move them along their buyer’s journey.

Why 57? It’s said that 57% of the sales process is over before a hot lead wants to talk to sales which is why 57 is the key number for lead scoring.

What Attributes Should You Consider In Lead Scoring?

You’ve got to look at the positive and the negative attributes when assigning lead scores. This ensures you’re not counting points for leads from an engagement that was not, and was never intended to be, sales related. Examples of this are people from inside your company or the industry checking out your website. Plus, if somebody originally signs up for your email then unsubscribes they’re no longer a hot lead so the points need to reflect that change.

3 Lead Scoring Tips To Help You Get Useful Results

Lead scoring takes some effort to be effective. When you hone your lead score parameters you give your sales and marketing teams good data to help them focus their efforts. Here are three things to consider when you’re setting up your lead scoring;

Lead scoring takes some time. The setup and initial analysis take some effort and then you might have to tweak it after a month based on data you’ve gathered. Then do it again. The good news is, knowing who your hot leads are all but eliminates wasted sales efforts on prospects who were never going to buy. Over the long term, the initial time investment is well worth it.
Not hot leads need to go. Sometimes a lead is deemed hot but they’re actually not. If this happens, you'll need to tweak the lead score formula to remove items or decrease score counts. Your hot lead values are only as good as the information you provide. And,
You’ll miss out on actual hot leads if you’re scoring is off. If a lead scored low on HubSpot but is in fact hot, you’ll need to add some of their actions to your lead scoring values. That way you can make sure future contacts are designated hot when they’re hot.

Hubspot Shares 4 Ways to Calculate Your Basic Lead Scores

Get your lead-to-customer conversion rate. Simply divide the number of new customers you acquire by the number of leads you generate, then use this number as your benchmark.
Use different attributes from customers your team identifies as higher quality leads. This is a judgment call based on your team’s knowledge, trust it. Be sure to use data like what type of information they’ve given you and how they've engaged with your business online.
Find out the close rates of each of those attributes. This means figuring out how many people become qualified leads (and customers) based on their actions through engagement.
Compare the close rates of each attribute with your overall close rate. Use this number to assign values for lead score points. The higher the close rate for an individual attribute compared to your overall numbers means you should assign that attribute a high points value.

How Does Lead Scoring Help Grow Business?

Lead scoring grows your business because your marketing and salespeople spend more time and effort engaging with genuine leads rather than casting a wide net with lower sales potential.

The key to success from lead scoring is to use it to manage your workflows and focus your content to filter and generate hot leads. When you know the focus of your content you can continue creating it within your workflow to encourage a hot lead through to a sale. Ideally, you’ll foster long term loyalty to your business too.

Lead scoring is a win-win collaboration between your sales and marketing teams and a good CRM tool such as HubSpot.

Remember, set up lead scoring the right way on HubSpot by analyzing the behaviours of your prospects using in-house sales knowledge. Then, knowing what a hot lead is and how they reached that status helps your marketing team focus their content efforts. Once you get started using lead scoring data, you’ll see hot leads convert faster and ensure you’re not missing out on new ones.