Guest Post by Erwin Arnold, Thalox:
Scoring leads has emerged as a crucial strategy for businesses to effectively prioritize and nurture their prospects. Lead Scoring is a methodology in which you add points/values to your contacts based on their behavior related to interest in products or services. It’s used by sales and marketing to qualify and determine the worthiness of leads and their stage in the customer journey.
Why should you score your leads?
Lead scoring is an important component of any successful alligned marketing and sales strategy. The ability to accurately score and qualify leads is one of the keys to success.
3 key benefits of scoring leads:
- Increased precision: a more accurate assessment of lead quality.
- Improved lead nurturing: Targeted and personalized engagement strategies based on lead scores lead to higher conversion rates.
- Better resource allocation: sales and marketing teams can focus their efforts on leads with the highest potential.
However, the limitations of traditional lead scoring, which often relies solely on behavioral data, have become increasingly apparent. It can fail to differentiate between highly engaged leads who are not an ideal fit and those who are a perfect fit but have shown minimal engagement.
Two-Dimensional Lead Scoring addresses this gap by evaluating leads based on two dimensions:
- their alignment with your ideal customer profile
- their interactions and behaviors with the brand
Two-Dimensional Lead Scoring in HubSpot
You can implement the Two-Dimensional Lead Scoring model in your HubSpot database. It considers both implicit (behavioral fit) and explicit (demographic fit) data when evaluating leads.
By assigning a numerical value to each lead based on their level of engagement and a letter which shows the “fit“ with your ideal customer profile, you can streamline your sales and marketing efforts, ensuring that your team focuses on the most promising opportunities.
In HubSpot, if you have HubSpot Professional or Enterprise, you can apply this method in two ways.
HubSpot Scoring properties
The first approach to score your leads in HubSpot requires some effort, beginning with the creation of two new scoring properties:
- HubSpot Score Explicit for the demographic data
- HubSpot Score Implicit for the behavioral data.
After having created those two new fields, start giving points to the different parameters like in this example:
To further understand how to set this in HubSpot, read Two-Dimensional Lead Scoring made it easy in HubSpot.
Lead Scoring feature in Marketing Hub
The second approach is to use HubSpot's new scoring feature, which launched not too long ago (as of October 2024, you’ll need to request access to the BETA). You'll see a 'Lead Scoring' button in the Marketing Hub menu. This feature is currently available for Marketing Professional and Enterprise users, making it easier than ever to fine-tune your lead qualification process.
Lead Scoring inside HubSpot Marketing Hub allows the creation of scores based on lead behavior, campaign interactions, and demographic data, for both individual contacts and companies. Users can develop engagement scores to measure lead activity and fit scores to assess alignment with target customer profiles.
The feature also offers for enterprise customers an AI-assisted scoring, which enhances accuracy by integrating AI with unified data and human insights. Additionally, score reporting provides insights into the factors influencing scores and tracks score changes over time.
How can I set it up?
Before diving into the intricacies of HubSpot's lead scoring, it's crucial to have a solid foundation. This ebook provides a downloadable template to design your scoring model, ensuring you have all the essential configurations in place before integrating with HubSpot.
Once you've organized your data using the template, it's time to set up the scores in HubSpot:
- To start, click 'Create a score.' Choose between a contact engagement score, which measures engagement based on interactions, or a contact fit score, which evaluates alignment with your ideal customer.
- Select relevant events or properties to assign points, up to a default maximum of 100.
- For engagement scores, you can apply score decay, where points decrease over time.
- After building the score, review and turn it on, set exclusions, and define where the score will be recorded.
In addition, If you’re using Marketing Hub Enterprise, you can create contact fit and engagement scores using AI. AI evaluates your contacts and provides recommendations based on the analysis, making scoring more accurate and data-driven.
The ebook also explores the AI-Powered Contact Engagement Score and guides readers through the process of configuring these scores for maximum impact.
Outperform your Lead Scoring with AI
If you are looking for an easier and more up-to-date approach, have a Starter plan, or lack the resources and time to set up your own lead scoring, there are better ways to manage lead scoring in HubSpot, by using a HubSpot-certified app.
Erwin Arnold, who has created over 100 lead scoring models in his career, encountered a recurring challenge: relying on gut feeling and manual setups was not enough. He believed there had to be a better way to get accurate, actionable insights from our data. So he decided to invest in Thalox, an AI-powered Lead Scoring tool for HubSpot users.
Thalox is a HubSpot certified integration, that utilizes AI and advanced machine learning algorithms to analyze historical contact data. It provides a unique Lead Scoring model based on customer engagement which is faster, more efficient, smarter, and designed to optimize your marketing and sales strategies in HubSpot.
The app eliminates the need for manual and gut-feeling score setting by using AI predictive analytics to deliver insights. This means you'll know which leads are most likely to engage with your next email, ensuring your efforts are directed toward the highest potential prospects.
Engagement dashboard to see your database development
By combining the robust two-dimensional scoring system in HubSpot with Thalox's AI-driven insights, you can create a more accurate and reliable lead scoring system. This integration not only enhances your ability to qualify leads but also ensures your marketing efforts are focused on prospects with the highest potential for conversion.
