If you’ve ever felt skeptical about lead scoring, you’re not alone. Plenty of marketers have been burned by systems that promised to show the best opportunities. But they’ve only delivered a pile of so-so leads, or worse, wasted time. Maybe you’ve wondered why your own carefully built scoring model just isn’t moving the needle. The truth is, lead scoring can be incredibly useful — but only if it’s set up the right way.
At Simple Machines, we talk to a lot of marketers that are frustrated with their lead scoring results. And honestly, we get it. The buyer journey is more complex than ever, and traditional scoring models often miss the mark by relying on outdated data, ignoring negative signals, or failing to keep up with real-world changes
But before you write it off altogether, let’s dig into what’s actually going wrong. With a few smart tweaks, your lead scoring can go from a source of skepticism to a true driver of sales and marketing.
What’s Going Wrong with Lead Scoring?
- Using Incomplete Data
It sounds simple, but fields can be misleading. If you’ve found the perfect property for what you need, it’s always best to double check it. As a best practice, we pull reports on each property ahead of time to ensure two things:
- The property has data in it.
- The property has live data.
While the HubSpot default properties are the safest, we understand the need to use different data sources. Verifying that everything is correct will save you headaches down the line! When there are multiple properties all factoring into each other, it’s harder to notice if one of them is no longer working.
Checking the fill rate in the property will give you a good impression of how reliable that property is.
This will save you from miscalculating your leads, as this problem often leads to undercounting. If a lead is giving all the signals they want to buy, you want to be sure you don’t lose out!
- Not using Negative Scoring Triggers
There’s a lot of data you can leverage. While there’s an understandable focus on positive markers (ie, if they’ve signed up for a webinar, give them extra points), negative markers are just as important.
Most commonly, if a contact is unsubscribed from your emails, that’s something you should factor in. But if they’re email has bounced completely, that’s a strong indication that the contact is using a defunct address, or is a spam contact in general. Additionally, if you have a career page on your website, that contact is probably a jobseeker, and may not be interested in your services, so you can mark them negatively if they visit that page.
Save your reps some time and subtract points for these!
- Ignoring Behavioral Data
While form submissions and CTA clicks are strong indicators, you may be missing out on more subtle indicators. Using webpage clicks or page views, albeit scored a little lower, can help you get a better view of your contact’s behavior. Submissions are huge signals of intent, it’s important to pay attention to the smaller signals too.
- Use Time Decay
Many moons ago we had a contact that was scoring a perfect one-hundred. We were initially excited to find out who they were, but when we dug into the record, the latest activity was from 2018. That was seven years ago at time of writing. We were understandably puzzled, but when we looked into it, each form submission gave the lead 25 points, and this contact had filled in the same form four times in one day.
The moral of the story is use time decay! Or at least a time frame that fits your organization. You can get a lot of rich data from using a percentage decay month over month, as you can score those that have interacted more recently accordingly. While absolutes can be helpful (ie, anyone who’s submitted a form in the last six months), time decay can give your leads’ most recent interactions more credit.
*Note that this a decay from the original number, so one-hundred will decay to eighty, then sixty, and so on.
- Failing to Adjust
So now I’ve told you all that, the final and most important thing we suggest is to adjust. Having a lead scoring system that doesn’t fit your market or your marketing activities is almost worse than not having none at all.
Markets evolve, and so do your leads. A static scoring system quickly becomes obsolete. If you’ve the time, review your criteria and adjust accordingly every quarter. You can use analytics to spot trends and refine your approach
How to Do Lead Scoring Right (The Simple Machines Way)
We help our clients leverage HubSpot and other platforms to unify sales and marketing, streamline operations, and drive revenue — with lead scoring as a key component.
Here’s our approach:
Define What Matters: Start with clear, sales-aligned criteria for what makes a lead qualified. This includes both must-have attributes and desirable characteristics.
Balance Fit and Behavior: Don’t let a lead’s company size or industry overshadow their actual engagement. Assign points to both their behaviour and who they are. Give higher weight to high-intent actions, but don’t neglect the smaller actions either. If you want to read more about this, we have a blog about this exact topic here.
Use Existing Engagement Data: Track meaningful interactions — website visits to key pages, content downloads, event attendance — not just form fills (which can be unreliable due to spam).
Keep It Simple (at first!): Your scoring model should be easy to understand and use. If your team can’t explain it in a sentence, it’s too complicated.
Iterate and Improve: Regularly revisit your scoring model. Analyze what’s working, what’s not, and adjust accordingly. The best systems are never “set and forget.”
Most importantly, put it to use. You can use lead scoring in a lot of different ways, such as reports, alerts, and automations. For example, you can alert your sales team any time their SQLs stop engaging as much, or when MQLs are show good potential for conversion. You can use lead scoring as a proactive measure to ensure no leads fall through the cracks.
Have an idea for rolling this out in your organization? Or is your own lead score in need of a freshen up? Drop us a line here and let’s collaborate!
