Need help figuring out which leads are worth your time?
This post will show you how to transform your lead prioritization using HubSpot lead scoring.
Our approach combines key traits like industry and role with engagement behaviors such as email opens and webinar attendance.
The result?
A more thoughtful way to focus on leads that are more likely to close.
With HubSpot lead scoring, you’ll replace guesswork with a clear scoring model to help prioritize the contacts and companies in your CRM to whom you can reach out.
Follow along to learn how to define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), set up scoring rules, and use predictive insights to spot high-quality leads faster.
By the end, you’ll have a system that saves time, improves results, and keeps your team aligned.
Relying on surface-level actions like website visits or email opens can lead to wasted effort on unqualified leads since it only focuses on engagement and not if the prospect is a good fit.
A contact can be highly engaged with your website content but be a poor fit for your company.
HubSpot lead scoring solves this by blending two critical dimensions:
Contact/Company Fit Data: Information like industry, company size, and role to evaluate alignment with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Engagement Behavior Data: Actions such as webinar attendance, email responses, or website conversions that signal interest in your products and services.
Scores in HubSpot lead scoring are calculated based on the criteria you establish within event and property rules, which are grouped into score categories.
Each lead score requires at least one score group, but multiple groups can collectively contribute to the total score.
You can define a maximum total score or assign individual limits to specific groups, allowing you to weigh certain criteria or events differently.
For instance, you might cap the points for awareness activities like page visits while assigning higher weights to conversion-focused events such as form submissions or scheduled meetings.
This ensures your scoring model aligns with your priorities.
With HubSpot lead scoring, you’re not just examining your leads' clicks; you’re learning who they are and how they fit your ideal customer profile.
Instead of treating every click or inquiry the same, HubSpot encourages you to look deeper.
You’ll start by defining what makes a great fit—traits like industry, role, or company size—and then combine that with how the lead engages with your content.
Let's use an example:
The overall lead score limit is 100, divided into two main categories: engagement with Sales and Engagement with Marketing.
The maximum score for the Engagement with Sales group is capped at 60 points.
Specific scoring values include 15 points for a started call, 10 for a booked meeting, and 20 for a completed meeting.
The maximum score for the Engagement with the Marketing group is 40 points.
The actions are weighted as follows: 6 points for clicking a CTA, 2 points for opening a marketing email, and 5 points for clicking a link in the email.
Let’s say a contact book a meeting, opens two marketing emails, and clicks three links within those emails:
Their Engagement with Sales score is 10 points for the booked meeting.
Their Engagement with Marketing score is 19 points, calculated as follows:
2 points for each email open (4 points) and 5 points for each of the three link clicks (15 points).
This results in a total overall score of 29 points, as displayed in the lead’s score property.
However, a contact’s lead score should not stay static.
Score decay keeps your lead scores focused on what’s happening right now.
Over time, old points slowly fade away. This ensures that leads who are active today receive more points and leads who stopped showing up receive fewer points.
As time passes, the points a contact “earns” for an action go down gradually.
Imagine you give 10 points when someone fills out a form.
After one month, these points drop to 5. After another month, they drop to zero.
This way, old actions don’t keep increasing forever.
In the next section, you’ll learn how to define your ideal customer profile and use it as the foundation for effective lead scoring, saving you time and improving your results.
Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) describes the businesses and roles that best match your products or services. Start by identifying key traits such as:
1. Industry: What sectors benefit most from your offerings?
2. Company Size: Small, mid-market, or enterprise?
3. Revenue: What is their annual revenue?
4. Roles: Who are the decision-makers or influencers?
Once you’ve defined these traits, create a prospect/fit matrix to visualize and prioritize them.
For instance, if your ideal customer is a midsize B2B tech company with a dedicated sales team, assign higher scores to leads matching these attributes.
Once you know these attributes, imagine plotting them on a simple prospect/fit matrix.
This matrix acts as a roadmap for assigning meaningful scores to HubSpot.
You sell marketing automation software, and your best customers are midsize B2B tech companies with dedicated sales teams.
By reflecting these traits in your matrix, you create a practical tool for determining the number of points to award each attribute.
Within HubSpot, you’ll set up scoring properties that translate your ICP attributes—like industry or job role—into point values.
For example, if your target market is shipping companies with at least 50 employees and a procurement team, assign points for the right company size and a few more for the correct title.
What makes this system truly useful is how it blends fit and engagement. As leads visit key pages, download content, or reply to emails, HubSpot automatically updates their scores.
By turning your matrix into point-based rules, you highlight leads aligned with your goals.
You’ve got a solid scoring system now, but you might want to fine-tune it further.
That’s where advanced techniques like negative scoring and time decay come in.
Negative scoring takes points away when leads show signs of disinterest, such as unsubscribing or never replying, ensuring that these less-engaged leads don’t appear as top priorities.
Meanwhile, time decay slowly lowers a lead’s score if they stop engaging, helping you stay focused on active leads.
Beyond these advanced techniques, you can also control which contacts or companies get scored in the first place.
On the Contacts or Companies tab of your scoring settings, you have two main options:
1. Score everyone and use “exclusion lists” to remove groups you don’t want to score.
2. Score only specific contacts/companies and use “inclusion lists” to focus on those groups.
Once you’ve set who gets scored, you can fine-tune your scoring ranges (thresholds) to group leads by how well they fit your profile and how engaged they are.
This also adds a color-coded property to see who’s doing great and who needs more attention.
Engagement or Fit Scores:
High, Medium, and Low (e.g., 70-100 = High, 40-69 = Medium, 0-39 = Low).
Combined Scores:
Labeled as A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, C1, C2, and C3. Letters (A, B, C) show how good the fit is, from best (A) to worst (C).
The numbers (1, 2, 3) show engagement, with one being very engaged and three being less engaged. For example, C1 means a poor fit but high engagement.
When you first turn on a score, it examines current and past data and sets a value for a contact or company.
You can use these scores in lots of ways.
You could create a list of contacts with a High score, build a workflow to give a salesperson new leads once they pass a score of 50, or send a notification when a company’s score exceeds 75.
These techniques, combined with negative scoring and time decay, help you keep your scoring system accurate and focused on the leads who need your attention right now.
Now that you have a scoring system that reveals which leads are truly worth your time, use that information to customize your messaging and outreach.
High-scoring leads with strong buying intent might receive a personalized demo or a meeting.
Those who fit your ICP but aren’t engaged might need educational resources first.
You respect their decision-making by meeting each lead where they are in their buying process.
This segmentation ensures that you don’t blast everyone with the same message.
Instead, you guide leads along their paths, offering the right content at the right time.
In the next section, you’ll learn how to measure the impact of these personalized, score-driven campaigns.
If you’re ready to build your scoring model, assign point values that reflect your priorities.
Industry alignment could be 10 points, company size is 8, and a senior marketing role is 5.
On the engagement side, a content download could be 3 points, a webinar attendance 5, and a reply to an email another 5.
Mix these up to define what “valuable” means. Perhaps surpassing 20 points triggers a sales notification, while lower-scoring leads stay nurtured until they’re ready.
Start simple, test your results, and refine as you learn what truly predicts conversions. In the final section, we’ll summarize everything and show you how to apply these insights daily.
Now that you’ve learned how to transform your lead prioritization with HubSpot lead scoring, it’s time to put these strategies into practice.
Start by defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and setting up a scoring system highlighting the leads most aligned with your goals.
Then, explore HubSpot’s lead-scoring features to uncover insights you might have missed.