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Lead Scoring (Lead Grading) 101

Lead Scoring


The main objective of lead scoring is to help the Sales team prioritize leads that are showing higher buying intent signals. Focus on the right accounts. Rebuild your funnel. 


This is accomplished by a combination of a Lead Grade and a Lead Behavioral Score:


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Lead Grade is comprised of criteria that qualifies someone within our main ICPs. This are a list of that criteria:


  • Location (United States & Canada)

  • Primary Industry

  • Job Function/Department

  • Management Level

  • Employee Size Band/Employee Count


The more information we gather on the lead, based on form fills and ZoomInfo enrichment, the higher the grade becomes. An A letter grade means that this person meets all the criteria to score high as someone in our ICP. A C or D means we either don’t have enough information on the lead OR they don’t meet our ICP qualifications. 


This does not mean we should ignore them, especially if they have raised their hand for a demo request. In the long term, lead scoring may help us identify new ICPs.



Lead Behavioral Score is a numerical score that the lead receives based on some sort of engagement with marketing initiatives. These come in the form of:


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Workflows in place to account for any discovery requests, in the way of a form fill or from review sites. These leads will be directly pushed to the BDR team, no matter the lead grade. 



Combining the two components, we get to this matrix:


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Workflows are in place to assure that any lead that falls into the purple area is routed to the BDRs. Any that fall in the white area will stay assigned to the Integration Marketo user in SFDC. 


Why do this? To allow the sales team visibility into other leads that may not meet that MQL threshold. This will allow them to see what’s available and if they plan to pursue, an approval process will be in place to get the lead reassigned to the BDR/AE that requested to work the lead. 




How to make Lead Scoring work for you?


  1. Create a Lead Queue list view of all your leads based on utm_term= discovery-request

    1. This will show you the leads assigned to you that have raised their hand to learn more. These should be contacted first. 

    2. All Discovery Request landing pages created in Marketo will have ChiliPiper, so direct booking will also take effect on leads from those pages if they select a time. 

  2. Create another Lead Queue list view of all your leads, sort by Lead Grade, and remove all leads that have utm_term=discovery-request (as those fall into the view you just created above)

    1. Make sure your list view contains the following fields: Lead Grade, Lead Behavioral Score, Lead Source, utm_source, utm_content, Employee Size Band, or any other fields that are beneficial to you. These will allow you to see at glance what leads you should go after first. 




What Lead Scoring is not:

  • Lead Scoring does not only show you leads that are ready to buy today

  • Lead Scoring is not a stand-alone marketing process; it is a sales and marketing effort

  • Lead Scoring does not mean to cherry-pick hot leads and ignore the rest

  • Lead Scoring does not sort your leads for you






Things to Note:

February 27 – Lead Scoring algorithm was launched

As of today, March 7, 2023, we are still looking at the data and optimizing the lead scoring model. We are working together to make sure our leads are being scored appropriately. 


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