Overview

Lead scoring identifies leads based on their level of engagement and readiness to buy. This score helps businesses prioritize leads and determine which ones are most likely to convert into paying customers.

Lead scoring is a key piece of lead qualification, which will help your B2B business prioritize sales follow up. For companies that have a steady flow of inbound leads, you’ll want to ensure sales can easily find the most engaged and qualified leads. Leads who aren’t ready to engage with sales (indicated by a lower score) should also be identified and nurtured by marketing until they are warm enough.

How to use this template

We’ve created the lead scoring template below as a starting point to outline your lead scoring model. Every business is unique and your final scoring model will likely end up looking different from ours.

Here’s how we would approach using this template:

Copy the Google Sheets doc to make your own edits.

Review all of the activities and scores proposed in the template. Add additional activities and adjust the scores as needed.

Define the scoring threshold that will flag Leads to sales. As a starting point, we propose starting with 100 points and iterating based on feedback from your sales team. You won’t know the perfect threshold until you’ve done some testing.

Share the proposed model with your team! Include your sales, marketing, product and leadership partners. We’ve included sign-off columns to document cross-functional alignment. A few questions we would ask to solicit constructive feedback:

1. Have we missed any activities that should be included here?
2. Are there any negative activities or signals that should be accounted for? For example, if an opportunity is closed-lost we propose subtracting 50 points from their score. Are there other signals like this?
3. Do you agree with the fast-track activities? Leads who perform these activities will be surfaced to sales immediately, so we want to be sure sales reps agree that these are warm.
4. Do you have any feedback on the individual scores? Qualified Leads who reach a score of 100 will be surfaced to sales for follow up.

Implement your lead scoring model in your Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) or work with your engineering and data science teams to achieve this in your desired platform. Here’s some documentation from popular MAPs to get you started:

1. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot)
2. Marketo
3. Hubspot

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