What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring ranks contacts by how likely they are to become valuable customers, so sales time goes to the people most worth calling first.
Fit and engagement scoring
Most useful models split the score in two. Fit asks whether the contact looks like your best customers: company size, industry, role. Engagement asks how actively they are interacting: pricing page visits, demo requests, replies. Sales CRM and Pipeline keeps the two apart, because a perfect-fit contact who ignores you needs a different response from an enthusiastic one who will never buy.
Lead scoring criteria
- Fit: job title or seniority, company size, industry, region.
- Engagement: visits to pricing or comparison pages, demo or trial sign-ups, email replies, event attendance.
- Negative signals: student or competitor email domains, unsubscribes, long inactivity.
A lead scoring example
Give 30 points for a target job title, 20 for a company of 10 to 200 people, 25 for a pricing page visit in the last week and 25 for a demo request. A contact at 70 or more goes straight to sales; one below 40 stays in nurture emails.
How to build a lead scoring model
Start from closed-won deals, not intuition: list what your last 30 customers had in common before they bought, and weight those attributes most. Review the model every quarter against what actually converted, and cut the weight of any signal that high scorers have but buyers do not.
Last reviewed 2026-11-01.