Your lead score measures diligence, not intent
Ten points for an opened email. Five for the click, fifteen for the whitepaper, twenty for attending the webinar. Above eighty points the lead counts as hot and moves to sales. Sounds like a system. It’s just arithmetic on activity, and activity says nothing about budget, nothing about timing, nothing about whether this person is even allowed to decide anything.
Every seller knows the result: the serial clicker. A working student at a large corporation who opens every newsletter, pulls every whitepaper, books every webinar because he’s writing a term paper on your field. Score: 240. Probability of buying: zero. Next to him, the CEO of an 80-person machine builder who visited the pricing page once and spent three minutes on the case study. Score: 25. The score sorts the working student to the top and the real deal to the bottom, and it does so systematically, because it rewards diligence instead of intent.
Then there’s the inflation. Every new campaign hands out points, none takes any away, and after two years half the database has scores past the threshold. The model gets maintained by whoever has time right now, often enough the marketing intern, who sets the point values by feel because nobody gave him a logic. Sales notices after the third dead handoff and stops looking at the score. Completely justified. From that moment the scoring isn’t just useless, it’s a facade: it suggests prioritization where none is happening.
What’s missing isn’t software. HubSpot, Salesforce, any MAP can score natively, the math engine is the smallest problem. What’s missing is a hypothesis. Who actually buys from you, and how do you spot it early? Maybe it’s company size plus industry plus a pricing page visit. Maybe it’s the second person from the same company within a week. It’s sitting in your won deals from the last two years, you just have to look. And then the hypothesis needs a feedback loop: sales grades every handoff, the point logic gets checked against real closed deals quarterly and adjusted.
Without those two things, hypothesis and loop, lead scoring is numerology. You add up numbers someone once made up and treat the sum like a truth.
Quick test for your model: pull the scores of your last ten won deals on the day of handoff. If you’re hesitating right now, you already know the answer.
