Glossary
What is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring is a method of ranking prospective customers by assigning point values to their behaviors and characteristics, helping sales teams prioritize outreach toward the leads most likely to convert.
A lead scoring model typically combines two categories of signal: behavioral (what someone actually does — visiting a pricing page, opening emails, attending a webinar, requesting a demo) and firmographic or demographic (who they are — company size, industry, job title, budget indicators). Each signal is assigned a point value, usually weighted toward the actions and attributes that have historically correlated with becoming a customer, and a lead's total score determines how it's routed.
The immediate payoff is sales efficiency: instead of a rep working every inbound lead in the order it arrived, high-scoring leads get contacted first and get a faster, more attentive follow-up, while low-scoring leads route into a slower-touch nurture sequence instead of consuming the same rep time. Done well, this raises close rates without requiring more leads or more sales headcount — it changes where existing attention gets spent.
Scoring models need periodic review rather than a one-time setup: the weights that predicted a good lead a year ago can drift as the business, its marketing channels, and its ideal customer profile change, and a model never revisited against actual close-rate data tends to quietly lose accuracy over time.