What Is Lead Scoring? Models, Signals, and How to Start

Lead scoring ranks your contacts by how likely they are to buy, so your team spends time on the right people. Done well, it aligns marketing and sales around the same priorities.

The two ingredients

Fit (who they are — role, company, industry) and intent (what they do — opens, clicks, visits, replies). A good score combines both.

Behavioral signals that matter

Campaign engagement, repeat visits, high-intent actions, and recency. Weight recent, high-intent behavior more than a click from six months ago.

How to start (without over-engineering)

Begin simple: a handful of signals with sensible weights. Set a threshold that triggers an alert or a journey. Review what actually converts and adjust.

Make the score do something

A score is only useful if it routes contacts to a play — a nurture journey, a sales alert, or a segment. Otherwise it is a vanity number.

Do not forget negative scoring

Scoring is not only about adding points. Subtract for signals that indicate a poor fit or disengagement — an unsubscribe, a role that never buys, a long stretch of inactivity. Negative scoring keeps your "hot" list actually hot instead of slowly filling with stale contacts.

Common pitfalls to avoid

Over-engineering on day one (start simple), scoring on vanity actions like a single open, never decaying old behavior, and — most common — building a score that nobody acts on. Review what your highest-scoring contacts actually did and prune the signals that do not correlate with revenue.

Keep it a living model

Buying behavior changes, and so should your model. Revisit weights quarterly against closed-won data, and treat the score as a hypothesis you keep testing — not a set-and-forget formula.

Zeluto scores on intent and engagement and feeds it into segments, journeys, and pipeline — see lead scoring.