What is Lead scoring?
Lead scoring ranks leads by how likely they are to buy, using fit signals such as company size and role and behavior signals such as pricing-page visits and email replies.
In more detail
A score lets sales spend time on the leads most likely to convert. Rule-based scoring adds points: +20 for a target industry, +15 for a director title, +10 for a pricing-page visit, -30 for a student email address. Predictive scoring trains a model on past won and lost deals. Either needs feedback. If reps never record outcomes, the model has nothing to learn from. The common failure is a score that sales distrusts and ignores. Show the reasons behind each score and review them every quarter against closed-won data. Keep a person in charge of thresholds, since a cutoff set too high starves the pipeline.
Example
A B2B agency scores form leads on company size, role and what the person wrote. Anything above 70 alerts the account owner in Slack within five minutes, and the rest enters a nurture sequence.