Managing CRM Leads with HubSpot Lead Scoring Tools

Lead Scoring tools are a strategic investment that drives revenue growth, improves team efficiency, and creates a more predictable and scalable sales process.

Lead qualification can be a tricky and time-consuming exercise. Not all CRM leads are created equal. Some may be a good fit for the products or services you offer and have the budget to work with you, while others may not. Some are ready to talk to sales today, while others are still in the early research phase. 

If your business doesn’t have a system in place to help categorise and prioritise CRM leads, this can lead to wasted time, missed opportunities, and frustration for both your team and your prospective customers.

Lead Scoring tools in HubSpot solve this problem. Points are assigned to a lead based on explicit and implicit data in order to help your sales and marketing teams categorise CRM leads into various “buckets”. 

Building an Effective Lead Scoring Model in HubSpot

Lead scoring tools need to be practical - or no one will use it. Effective lead scoring should look like this:

• Simple visual representation of the quality and engagement of contacts in your database
• Easy to spot your best performing marketing channels / lead sources
• Easy to evaluate whether you’re attracting the right audience
• Easy to identify who should be nurtured by marketing
• Easy to identify which prospects to prioritise for sales outreach
• Easy to identify good opportunities for client testimonials, referrals, upsells and cross-sells
• Easy to spot which accounts could be at risk and prevent unnecessary customer churn

Ultimately, the main question lead scoring should answer is:

“Is pursuing this prospect worth my time?”

We use a combination of various score types within HubSpot to answer this. 

• Lead Scores (available with Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise)
  • Fit Score 
  • Engagement Score 
  • Combined Score (Enterprise only) 
    
    
• Health Score (available with Service Hub Professional or Enterprise)

How to build a Fit Score in HubSpot

Your Fit Score in HubSpot uses explicit data points made up of information the prospect has given to your organisation directly (stored within property values). These can be things like:

• Company Size
• Annual Revenue
• Industry
• Job Title
• Budget
• Buying Role

Before you build a Fit Score in HubSpot, we recommend developing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This will inform which data points you’ll need to build and capture in HubSpot consistently to be able to configure your Fit Scoring model effectively. You can download our ICP and Buyer Persona workbook if you’re not sure where to start with this exercise.

Your Fit Score tells your business how closely a potential customer aligns with your ideal customer profile (ICP). This allows you to prioritise your sales and marketing efforts towards the most promising CRM leads. Higher scores indicate a prospect is more likely to:

• Be interested in what you offer
• Have the budget for your product or service
• Be easy to work with and retain as a customer
• Have a higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Questions your HubSpot Fit Score can answer

• Company Fit Score: Is this company a good fit for my products and services?
• Contact Fit Score: Does this person have the right authority/decision-making power to buy from me?
  
  

How to build an Engagement Score in HubSpot

Your Engagement Score tells your business how interested a prospect is in your product or service based on their behaviour. A high score suggests they're actively researching solutions and potentially closer to making a buying decision.

Your Engagement Score uses implicit behavioural data from insights you’ve gathered by observing the prospect’s activity. These can be things like:

• Visiting your website frequently
• Downloading content (white papers, ebooks)
• Opening and clicking on your emails
• Engaging with your ad campaigns
• Attending a webinar
• Meetings booked
• Calls
• Email replies
  
  

It answers the question: Is this contact or company interested in my products or services?

Using a Lead Scoring matrix to identify and segment your hottest CRM leads

When combined, your Fit Score and Engagement Score create a powerful method for identifying your hottest CRM leads. We call this your Lead Scoring Matrix. HubSpot Marketing Enterprise users are able to build a Combined Lead Score in a single property, which includes a built-in Lead Scoring Matrix (see below). 

HubSpot Marketing Pro users will need to build a Fit Score and an Engagement Score as two separate properties and use these together in custom reports, filters and list criteria to achieve a similar result (see below). 

How to build a customer Health Score in HubSpot

HubSpot’s Health Score is similar in functionality to a Combined Lead Score but is available exclusively to Service Hub Pro or Enterprise users.

It considers not just activity, but also the quality and depth of a customer's interactions with your business, including things like:

• Meetings booked
• Calls
• Email replies
• NPS 
• CSM sentiment
• Ticket activity and SLAs

A high Health Score suggests a customer is:

• More likely to reconvert or repurchase
• Open to communication and upselling attempts
• A potential brand advocate who may be willing to participate in testimonials, case studies or provide referrals

Your Health Score essentially provides your business with insight into the trajectory of the relationship. It answers the question: Is my relationship with this customer strong enough for them to continue to buy from me?

The business benefits of CRM lead management and scoring tools within HubSpot

As you’ve seen, HubSpot’s Scoring tools shouldn’t only apply to your pre-sales process for lead qualification, they can also add value post-sales in continuing to assess customer fit, engagement and relationship health on an ongoing basis. 

Lead scoring tools should benefit your business in the following ways throughout the entire customer lifecycle:

Sales and marketing alignment 

Lead scoring tools provide a shared definition of a qualified lead, fostering better communication and collaboration between sales and marketing teams. This removes ambiguity and ensures everyone is working towards the same goals.

Streamlined lead nurturing 

CRM leads that aren't quite ready to speak with sales can be automatically enrolled into targeted nurturing campaigns within HubSpot, keeping them engaged and moving them closer to becoming sales-qualified leads (SQLs). 

CRM leads that are not a good fit for your business can be segmented out and handled differently - for example, if you can’t sell to them at all, you could provide them with helpful resources and direct them elsewhere. If you could still sell to them, but they’re just not a great fit for the products and services you offer, you can provide lighter-touch nurturing that is not actively driving those leads to get in touch with the sales team. 

Improved conversion rates

By focusing your nurturing efforts on the most promising CRMleads, marketers should see a significant lift in conversion rates from Lead through to Customer, maximising the ROI of marketing efforts.

Increased sales efficiency

By spending less time chasing cold leads, sales teams can spend more time closing deals with highly engaged prospects. This directly impacts revenue generation.

Improved customer retention

Better fit, more engaged prospects should lead to greater customer retention and expansion rates. Customer service teams can easily monitor the health of key accounts and identify growth opportunities. 

Data-driven optimisation 

HubSpot's reporting tools allow you to track the performance of your lead scoring model and continuously refine it for optimal results. You can see which actions and attributes correlate most strongly with closed deals, allowing you to fine-tune the system and maximise its effectiveness.