Understand the lead scoring tool

To prioritize the contacts and companies in your CRM, you can build custom lead scores based on contact or company actions or properties. Scores assign values to leads so you can evaluate which contacts or companies are likely to become customers. When you create a lead score, it evaluates records based on criteria and sets values for a corresponding score property. You can use score properties in other HubSpot tools such as lists, workflows, or reports.

In this article, learn more about the types of scores you can create, how scores are calculated, and how to further customize and analyze your scores.

Types of scores

You can create the following types of lead scores for contacts and companies:

• Engagement scores: qualify records based on their actions and interactions, such as visiting your website, subscribing to your newsletter, clicking a CTA, or opening a marketing email. For contacts, engagement scores evaluate a contact's actions. For companies, engagement scores evaluate a company's associated contacts' actions. Learn how to create an engagement score.
• Fit scores: qualify records based on their demographic information through property values, such as their age, job title, company size, or annual revenue. Learn how to create a fit score.
• Combined scores (Enterprise only): qualify records based on engagement criteria and fit criteria. These scores populate a combined score value that looks at both actions and demographic information, as well as individual engagement and fit scores if you also want to look at them separately. Learn how to create a combined score.

How scores are calculated

Scores are calculated based on the criteria you set for event and property rules in score groups. Each score must have at least one score group, but you can include multiple groups that add up to the total score. You can set a limit for the maximum total score, but can also set maximum scores for each group to weigh groups of criteria or events differently. For example, you could limit points for a group of awareness events, such as page visits, and allow more points for a group of conversion events, such as sales form submissions and meetings.

To better understand the different score limits and values:

• Score limit: the maximum number of points for the overall score. Once a record reaches the limit, no more points will be added to their score. A record's overall score is what appears as the value in the score property.
• Group limit: the maximum number of points for a specific group. Once a record reaches the group limit, no more points will be added to their score from that group. All group limits add to the overall score limit. A record's values for each group add up to their overall score.
• Criteria points: the points assigned to each individual property or event rule. Points can either be added to or subtracted from the score. In each group, the total criteria points can be below or equal to the group limit. A record's values for each rule contribute to the group score, which then contributes to the total score.

• The overall score limit is 100.
• The Engagement with sales group limit is 60 points. The score values are 15 points for a started call, 10 points for a booked meeting, and 20 points for a completed meeting.
• The Engagement with marketing group limit is 40 points. The score values are 6 points for a CTA click, 2 points for a marketing email open, and 5 points for a marketing email link click.
• If a contact books a meeting, opens two marketing emails, and clicks three links in the emails:
  • Their Engagement with sales group score is 10 points.
  • Their Engagement with marketing group score is 19 points.
  • Their overall score (shown in the score property) is 29 points.

Positive and negative points

For each rule, you can choose to add or subtract points. For example:

• A contact has high engagement with your marketing content, but recently unsubscribed from your newsletter. You can add points for the marketing engagement, but subtract points for the unsubscribe.
• A company has a strong fit score based on size and industry, but they’re located in a region where your company doesn’t operate. You can add points for good fit industry and size, but subtract points for a non-operating region.

Score decay

For engagement or combined score event groups, you can turn on score decay, which automatically reduces an individual event's score based on how long ago a scored event occurred. Score decay is independent to each event, follows linear logic, and decayed scores aggregate to the overall score value.

For example, a rule gives 10 points when a specific form is filled out. If this event's decay is set to 50% every month, then one month after the form was filled out, the 10 points from that event will be cut in half and the event now contributes 5 points to the score. The decay is based on the original event score value (i.e. 10 points). In this example, another month later, the form submission contributes 0 points to the score.

Score decay also applies to historical data. For example, if a rule adds 2 points for a CTA click with 100% decay in 3 months, if the CTA click happened 4 months ago, the contact won't get 2 points.

AI Scores (Enterprise only)

For contact engagement and fit scores, you can create scores using AI. When you create an AI score, your contacts are evaluated to train the AI model and a score is built with recommendations based on the evaluated contacts.

For example, if you set Start: Marketing Qualified Lead, End: Sales Qualified Lead, Timeframe: 30 days, the AI will identify commonalities among contacts who transitioned from Marketing Qualified Lead to Sales Qualified Lead in the past 30 days and generate a score with criteria based on the insights.

Score inclusion and exclusion lists

When you create a score, you can select which records should or should not be scored. When setting up a score, on the Contacts or Companies tab:

• If you select to score all contacts/companies, you can add exclusion lists to score all records except those in the selected lists.
• If you select to score specific contacts/companies, you can add inclusion lists to score only the records on the selected lists.

Learn more about selecting which records to score in engagement scores, fit scores, or combined scores.

Score properties

When you build a score, a corresponding score property is created that stores the contact and company values for that score. When a score is turned on, the contacts and companies will be evaluated retroactively and the score property value will be set. The property will update continuously when a contact or company meets any of the score criteria.

During the score set up, you can customize the name of the property and how it's organized in your contact and company property groups. For combined scores (Enterprise only), three properties are created: one total score that stores the combined value from engagement and fit points, one engagement score that stores only the engagement points, and one fit score that stores only the fit points.

For example, your business sells two different services, with different engagement criteria to help decide whether a contact is a good lead. You may want to create separate engagement scores for each. In this case, you'd have two separate properties that you can use track the scores on records or in filters of views, lists, workflows, or reports.

Score thresholds

For each score, you can set up score thresholds to categorize records based on their score values. An additional threshold property is created with color-coded labels for each score range so you can quickly find good leads.

• For engagement and fit scores, the labels are High, Medium, and Low. For example you can set 70-100 as High, 40-69 as Medium, and 0-39 as Low.

• For combined scores, the labels are A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, C1, C2, and C3. The letters refer to the fit score values where A is high-fit and C is low-fit. The numbers refer to engagement score values, where 1 is high engagement and 3 is low engagement. For example, a low-fit but highly engaged contact would have a value of C1.

What happens when a score is turned on or updated

Turning on a score

When a score is first turned on, contacts and companies are evaluated retroactively based on their current and historical property values or actions, then a value is set for the score property. Moving forward, contacts' and companies' values for the score property will be continuously updated based on changes to their property values and actions.

Updating a score

When a score is updated, contact and company current and historical property values and actions are re-evaluated based on the changes you've made to the score, then their values for the score property are updated.

If you're using the score in other tools (e.g., views, lists, workflows, reports, etc.) they may be impacted if the changes you've made affect the criteria set in these tools. To verify and update where the score property is used:

• In your HubSpot account, navigate to Marketing > Lead Scoring.
• In the row of the score, click the number in the Properties column.
• Click the name of the score or threshold property for which you want to view usage.
• In the property editor, navigate to the Used In tab.
• If needed, click the tool to edit or remove how the property is used.

Use lead scores in other tools

Once you've turned on scores, you can use the score properties in other tools to identify and report on your leads. For example, you could:

• Create a saved view or list of all contacts with a High score according to your score thresholds.
• Create a workflow to automatically assign an owner to unworked contacts with a score over 50.
• Create a workflow to send a notification to the record owner when a company's score goes above 75.

Score history and performance

Once you've created and turned on scores, you can view more details and charts about a record's score history using cards on records. If your account has a Marketing Hub Enterprise subscription, you can also analyze reports that show how scores are performing and how records are being categorized into your score thresholds.

Additional resources

For instructions on how to build each type of score, refer to these articles:

• Build engagement scores
• Build fit scores
• Build combined scores

If you prefer a video walkthrough, watch the following lessons on the HubSpot Academy:

• What is Lead Scoring?
• How to Use Lead Scoring