With inbound marketing businesses aim to attract new leads, nurture, and convert them. This process requires the collaboration of both marketing and sales teams. Any business implementing an inbound strategy, knows the importance of qualifying leads. There are going to be tons of leads you attract, but are they all worth going after? No, not all leads have the potential of becoming paying customers. Hence, it is important to segment leads and prioritize if they have the potential to convert.
Lead scoring is an effective tool that can help sales and marketing teams determine which prospects are going to be valuable for an organization. HubSpot’s lead scoring software is a great tool to help your teams segment leads that are high priority. This makes it easy for the sales team to focus only on this list of leads, instead of wasting time on leads which are not interested in becoming customers. In this article, we will discuss everything about HubSpot’s lead scoring tool so that you can leverage it to successfully qualify your leads.
Related article: HubSpot Audit
What is lead scoring?
HubSpot defines lead scoring as “a process of assigning values, often in the form of numerical points, to each lead you generate for the business.” These scores are based on various attributes like how they have engaged with your website or if they signed up for a newsletter. It determines how engaged these leads are with your business. The process of lead scoring enables the sales and marketing teams to prioritize select leads and spend time and resources on them. These leads can convert into paying customers who prove valuable for the growth of the business.
The lead scoring system looks different for each company. What attributes are important and how many points to assign for it depends on your business. If you want to figure out how to come up with these attributes and points, look at your existing customers. Look at their buyer’s journey and how they converted. This data can help you determine which attributes are important and deserve high points.
HubSpot Lead Scoring
Lead scoring seems simple enough, however with increasing numbers of contacts it can get complicated. Every business needs a tool that can help them automate lead qualification. HubSpot Lead Scoring tool enables you to automatically assign values to leads based on both positive and negative attributes. This tool allows you to select which attributes are the most important for your sales and marketing teams when qualifying leads. For example, if a lead has opened your email, you may assign them 1 point and if they have signed up for a newsletter you may assign them 5 points.
Positive attributes
Positive attributes are the characteristics that will increase a contact’s points. For example, if your product targets buyers who are at the VP level, then you can add a positive attribute for a certain job title. If someone is a vice president then that contact will get 5 points added to their lead score.
Negative attributes
Negative attributes deduct a lead’s points. For example, if a contact is in a country or region that you don’t serve in, then you can deduct points from that contact based on the country.
Let’s find out how to set up lead scoring on HubSpot.
How to Set Up HubSpot Lead Scoring
Before you start setting up lead scoring on HubSpot, have a discussion between the sales and marketing teams. Review previous data on your existing customers to understand which attributes led them to engage and convert. It is important to find out the key attributes as you will be setting it up to assign points. We have already discussed a few examples above of positive and negative attributes. Find out which ones work best for your business.
After you have decided and made a list of these attributes, you can start setting it up on HubSpot.
- Go to your HubSpot account.
- Click the settings icon on the top-right of your main navigation bar.
- In the left sidebar menu, go to Properties.
- Scroll or search for HubSpot score property.
- Click Edit.
This will lead you to a form that will enable you to set your positive and negative attributes and assign points.
Image from HubSpot
- Click +Add criteria in the Positive or Negative sections to set criteria that will add or remove points from the score.
- After setting the criteria, as you are just starting make sure to select “is known” and then click Apply Filter.
- Then update your score and select save.
Note that the criteria options depend on your subscription tiers.
The process to decrease someone’s score is the same, except you will add all the criteria under Negative attributes. The criteria you set depend on your business, hence it is best to discuss before you set up lead scoring.
The “AND” & “OR” options
HubSpot offers both “AND” and “OR” options when you set your positive and negative lead scoring attributes. When you use “AND” between two attributes, it means the lead must have both the attributes to receive the scores. For example, if you have set two positive attributes like job title and location. If the lead has only one out of the two attributes, then they will not receive the positive score. They will only get points if they have both these attributes.
On the other hand, with the “OR” option, a lead will get points for having one attribute out of the two.
Predictive Lead Scoring
The steps we discussed above are for HubSpot’s manual lead scoring, now we will talk about Predictive Lead Scoring. With Predictive Lead Scoring you do not have to set up all the attributes manually, as this tool automatically tells you which leads should be prioritized. This tool uses predictive machine learning algorithms. HubSpot analyzes your existing customers to determine the probability of open contacts closing within 90 days.
Predictive Lead Scoring has two properties that allow you to analyze and segment your contacts. These are as follows:
Likelihood to close
This property is automatically assigned by HubSpot to your leads based on the data points collected by CRM. It is represented by percentage. It analyzes the leads based on the customers the sales team has interacted with in the past. If a lead has 50% likelihood to close that means, this lead is 50% likely to close in 90 days.
Contact Priority
This property analyses all contacts in your CRM and splits them into four groups:
- Very High
- High
- Medium
- Low
HubSpot predicts which leads have the highest priority and which have low probability to convert. It considers your customer’s behavior and other patterns to predict these outcomes. This is very useful for sales and marketing teams as they can prioritize contacts easily with the help of this contact property.
Remember that for both these properties, HubSpot considers previous interactions with customers. It is important that sales teams keep a log of all customers’ interactions and behaviors that can make these predictions more accurate.
Let’s look at how you can use predictive lead scoring.
- Navigate to Contacts
- Click on More Filters at the top of contact list
- Search for either contact priority or likelihood to close
- Choose is known
- Click Apply Filter
After these steps your contact list will show each lead’s predictive scores. With the help of these filters your sales team can easily view which leads are worth pursuing.
Lead scoring can help you easily qualify leads to pass on to your sales and marketing teams. This saves your company time, efforts, and resources as you only pursue leads that are going to prove valuable. It makes the qualification process easy, automated, and more sophisticated. Spending time doing it manually can be tedious, and time consuming. As your contact list grows you will need help from these tools to automate the process and make it quicker.
Are you new to HubSpot? As a HubSpot certified agency, we can help you get started on this platform to streamline your marketing and sales efforts. Get in touch with us to find out more.
