How a Marketing Agency Used AI to Design their Lead Scoring System in HubSpot
When running a sales campaign or Account Based Marketing campaign, you want your sales people to talk to the right people at the right time. Lead scoring is how you know the right person is ready, now, for that reach out. Getting it right will be the difference between a sales person ringing the gong today, or leaving a voice mail for the umpteenth time.
In this guide, you’ll learn how our marketing agency revolutionized our lead qualification process by combining AI’s analytical power with HubSpot’s robust scoring features. We’ll show you how to do this too, and walk you through our step-by-step instructions on how to build this for yourself in less than an hour:
– Define and quantify their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
– Create custom lead scoring properties in HubSpot
– Implement progressive profiling to gather key information
– Automate lead qualification and sales team assignments
– Filter out poor-fit prospects with negative scoring rules
Whether you’re struggling with lead qualification efficiency or looking to optimize your existing process, this practical approach will help you build a more effective, automated lead scoring system that aligns with your business’s growth objectives.
Step 1: Training the AI on Our Company DNA
Our first crucial step was to feed an AI system comprehensive information about who we are and who we serve. Think of it as teaching AI to be your most knowledgeable sales team member—one that knows every detail about your business and ideal customer (ICP).
We chose to use Claude.ai to design our lead scoring system because we felt it was more comprehensive than ChatGPT. And, its paid plan just worked better for our needs. You may find ChatGPT works better for you. You can always try both, or a different platform entirely. The important thing is to use the AI tools that you like best.
We started by gathering and documenting detailed information about our agency:
Company Foundation
– Our industry description and positioning
– Complete service offering breakdown
– Our users’ ultimate goals and objectives
– Core value statements and promises
– Competitive landscape analysis
– Key differentiators in the market
Customer-Centric Elements
– Main features and benefits of our services
– Detailed ideal customer profile (ICP)
– Primary problems we solve for clients
– Common customer frustrations we address
– Soft benefits our clients experience
You are a marketing and growth expert who specializes in helping software companies get leads from their website using HubSpot.
Here is my company profile and ICP documentation:
[Paste your company/ICP documentation]
Say, “Done” when you got all that.
By feeding this comprehensive information into our AI system, we created a foundation for intelligent lead scoring that truly reflected our agency’s unique position and target market. This wasn’t just about creating a generic scoring system—it was about teaching AI to think like us, understand our ideal clients, and recognize the subtle signals that indicate a perfect-fit prospect.
What made this approach different from traditional lead scoring was the AI’s ability to process and correlate all these data points. Instead of relying on basic demographic scoring, our AI-powered system could understand the nuanced relationships between different attributes and their impact on lead quality.
Pro Tip: Don’t rush this foundation-setting phase. If you don’t have a company profile or ICP ready, you are NOT ready for lead scoring.
The more detailed and accurate your input data, the more effective your lead scoring system will be. We spent considerable time ensuring our documentation was comprehensive and reflected our most current understanding of our market and ideal customers.
Step 2: Designing Our ICP Framework with AI
After feeding our company data into Claude, we were ready for a crucial step: creating a structured ICP definition that could be directly implemented in HubSpot. We needed something more sophisticated than traditional ideal customer profiles—we needed a framework that could be programmed into our lead scoring system.
Please help me create an ICP definition that can be easily programmed into HubSpot for lead scoring and form building. Aim for 5-7 of the most important based on our business. Tell me specifically what properties in HubSpot will be needed and what options should be available under each property.
Here’s how we worked with Claude to break down our ICP into programmable attributes:
Firmographic Attributes
We identified key company characteristics that indicated a good fit, including:
– Company size (focusing on mid-market organizations)
– Annual revenue thresholds
– Industry verticals that consistently succeeded with our services
– Geographic locations where we delivered the best results
– Growth stage and business maturity indicators
Technographic Attributes
We analyzed the technical requirements that made prospects more likely to succeed:
– Current marketing technology stack
– HubSpot implementation status
– Integration requirements
– Technical sophistication level
– Existing automation capabilities
Behavioral Attributes
We looked at prospects’ actions that signaled serious intent:
– Content consumption patterns
– Website interaction frequency
– Tool or calculator usage
– Email engagement rates
– Social media interaction patterns
Persona Attributes
We defined the characteristics of decision-makers who typically became successful clients:
– Role and decision-making authority
– Pain points and challenges
– Budget authority level
– Team structure and size
– Strategic priorities and goals
Implementation in HubSpot
With these attributes defined, we created custom properties in HubSpot:
Pro Tip: We learned that using single-select options rather than free text fields was crucial for consistent scoring.
This allowed us to assign specific numerical values to each option and create more nuanced scoring rules later in the process.
Key Insight: While it might be tempting to track every possible attribute, we found that focusing on 5-7 of the most predictive indicators per category yielded the best results. This kept our system focused and prevented score dilution from less relevant factors.
This structured approach gave us a solid foundation for our lead scoring system while keeping the implementation manageable.
Step 3: Implementing a Weighted Lead Scoring System
Before we dive into our scoring framework, there’s an important update that could save you hours of setup time: HubSpot has recently released an AI-powered lead scoring tool in beta. While not perfect, we found it streamlined our setup process. When we first created our scoring system, we had to manually configure each attribute and score. Now, HubSpot’s AI tool provides a strong foundation that you can refine based on your specific needs.
Quick Note on HubSpot’s AI Scoring Tool:If you’re implementing this today, start with HubSpot’s AI scoring tool. Even though it’s in beta, the scoring experience is significantly better than the traditional manual approach. Our recommendation? Run the AI tool first, review its suggestions, and then adjust the scores based on your specific ICP. If you’re not satisfied with the AI-generated scores, you can still use the new interface to manually adjust scores—it’s much more intuitive than the old system.
Run that again, but this time add the lead score next to each option based on our ICP.
Setting Up Your Scoring System
Remember to consider all your ICP attributes when setting up scores:
- Firmographic Attributes (company size, revenue, industry, location)
- Technographic Attributes (tech stack, implementation status)
- Behavioral Attributes (engagement patterns, content interaction)
- Persona Attributes (role, decision-making authority)
Tips from Our Experience
Step 4: Implementing Negative Scoring to Filter Out Poor-Fit Leads
One of the most powerful features of our lead scoring system is its ability to automatically filter out poor-fit prospects. We implemented negative scoring rules to protect our sales team’s time and maintain data quality.
We don’t want people with gmail accounts or who are just asking us for backlinks etc. Create a series of negative lead scoring rules so we can weed them out.
Setting Up Negative Scoring Rules
Navigate to HubSpot Score property and add your negative rules. Here’s an example of what that might look like:
– Generic email domains (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.): -20 points
– Job title contains “SEO,” “Link Building”: -30 points
– Website URL contains specific spam indicators: -50 points
– Form submission contains backlink-related keywords: -40 points
Step 5: Progressive Profiling Strategy
After setting up our AI-powered lead scoring system and negative scoring rules, we faced a new challenge: how could we gather all the information we needed for accurate scoring without overwhelming our prospects?
The answer was progressive profiling—a strategic approach to collecting information gradually as leads engage with our content. Instead of hitting prospects with a lengthy form asking for every detail upfront, we created a series of shorter, more targeted forms that would help us build a complete picture over time.
Obviously, we can’t ask all those questions in a single form. How would I build these forms so as to progressively get more information as they move from lead to subscriber to MQL to SQL? Suggest what types of content might get the diffent ICP qualification form questions as the main question, and the progressive ones.
Form Structure
Here’s how we structured our progressive profiling forms:
- Purpose: Basic information capture
- Primary use: Blog subscriptions
- Fields: Simple email collection
- When to use: Top of funnel content like blog posts and newsletters
- Purpose: More detailed information for MQLs
- Primary use: Middle of funnel content
- Fields: Building on initial contact data
- When to use: Downloadable content, webinars, whitepapers
- BOFU Form
- Purpose: Comprehensive information gathering
- Primary use: Bottom of funnel conversion points
- Fields: Detailed qualification questions
- When to use: Demo requests, consultation bookings
Technical Implementation
Pro Tips
- Keep your initial form as simple as possible—just an email address is often enough
- Use your secondary form to gather the most critical ICP qualification data
- Save the most detailed questions for your BOFU form, when prospects are more invested
- Always enable smart fields to avoid asking for information you already have
Step 6: Lead Score Milestones
With our scoring system in place, we needed to determine the critical thresholds that would trigger status changes in our leads. These milestones would automatically move contacts through our pipeline—from lead to subscriber, then to MQL, and finally to SQL.
At what lead score does it makes sense to change a lead or subscriber into an MQL and then SQL and then assign the contact to the sales person?
Determining Your Thresholds
Rather than using arbitrary numbers, we recommend:
Status Progression
Set up clear definitions for each stage:
- Lead → Subscriber (initial engagement)
- Subscriber → MQL (showing qualified interest)
- MQL → SQL (ready for sales contact)
- SQL → Sales Assignment (ready for direct outreach)
Implementation in HubSpot
Create workflows for automatic lead status changes:
Pro Tip: Start conservative with your thresholds and adjust based on sales team feedback.
It’s better to slightly under-qualify initially than to overwhelm your sales team with leads that aren’t ready for contact.
Step 7: Smart List Management
To effectively manage our growing pipeline of leads, we created a system of Smart Lists in HubSpot that automatically categorizes and tracks contacts based on their status and engagement level.
I’m going to have Leads, Subscribers, MQLs, & SQLs. How will I create these Lists and then manage them in HubSpot? How do I keep track of who I contacted and who needs to be contacted?
Setting Up Your Smart Lists
First, navigate to Contacts > Lists in HubSpot. Here’s how we structured our lists:
- Based on established lead score threshold
- Includes contacts who meet our marketing qualification criteria
- Automatically updates as leads reach the MQL score threshold
- Contains leads that meet sales-ready criteria
- Automatically populates based on defined scoring thresholds
- Includes behavioral triggers that indicate sales readiness
- Captures leads who’ve reached our highest lead scores
- Indicates leads ready for personal outreach
- Prioritizes leads who haven’t received direct contact
- Contacted Hot Leads
- Tracks leads who’ve received initial outreach
- Helps prevent duplicate contact attempts
- Monitors follow-up timing
Managing Your Lists
To keep these lists effective we recommend the following steps:
- Review and update criteria regularly based on conversion patterns
- Monitor list membership changes daily
- Track engagement levels within each list
- Use HubSpot’s task management features to coordinate outreach
Pro Tips
- Set up notifications for when leads move between lists
- Use list membership as triggers for automated workflows
- Regular clean-up of lists keeps your system running efficiently
- Create custom views for different team members based on their roles
By maintaining these Smart Lists, we’ve created a dynamic system that helps us stay on top of our lead management without letting qualified prospects slip through the cracks.
Step 8: Sales Qualification Script
The final piece of our lead scoring puzzle was creating a structured sales qualification script. This script ensures our sales team consistently gathers the right information while validating our AI-driven scoring during actual conversations.
Give me a script I can use on a 15-minute qualification call that helps me figure out if this lead is in my ICP or not, reference the BANT framework as well.
Opening the Conversation
Start with a warm introduction that sets clear expectations:“Thanks for taking the time to connect today. I’d like to learn more about your needs and see how we might be able to help. Would it be alright if I ask you a few questions to better understand your situation?”
BANT Framework Questions
Budget
- Current allocation for marketing technology
- Investment expectations for this type of solution
- Fiscal year and budget planning cycle
Authority
- Decision-making process within the organization
- Key stakeholders involved
- Role in the selection process
Need
- Current challenges with lead qualification
- Existing processes and pain points
- Goals and desired outcomes
Timeline
- Implementation expectations
- Key drivers for change
- Project priorities and deadlines
ICP Qualification Areas
Company Details
- Organization size and structure
- Industry and market focus
- Growth stage and trajectory
Technical Environment
- Current marketing stack
- Integration requirements
- Technical capabilities
Process Assessment
- Existing lead qualification methods
- Volume of leads being processed
- Current conversion metrics
Closing the Conversation
Wrap up with clear next steps:“Based on what you’ve shared, I think the next best step would be [specific recommendation]. How does that align with your thoughts?”
Implementation Guidelines
It’s important to keep track of things like:
- Key qualification criteria met
- Areas requiring further investigation
- Follow-up actions needed
- Common objections raised
Pro Tip: Document insights gained from each call to refine your ICP and scoring criteria over time. This feedback loop helps improve your AI-driven scoring accuracy.
Sales Playbook Integration
Incorporate this script into your sales playbook with:
- Question frameworks
- Response guidelines
- Qualification criteria
- Next step protocols
Remember: The goal isn’t just to gather information—it’s to validate our AI scoring system and ensure we’re focusing our efforts on the prospects most likely to succeed with our solution.
Where to Go From Here
We know this might seem like a lot of work—and we won’t sugar-coat it, it is. Building an AI-powered lead scoring system requires careful planning, thoughtful implementation, and ongoing refinement. But the return on investment is transformative. When we implemented this system for our own agency, we saw dramatic improvements in sales efficiency and conversion rates while simultaneously reducing the time our team spent qualifying leads.
Two Ways Forward
DIY Approach
If you’re ready to tackle this on your own, start with the first step—documenting your company information and ICP. Take it one phase at a time, and don’t rush the foundation-setting phase. Remember that your scoring system will evolve as you gather more data and insights.
Let Us Do the Heavy Lifting
If you’d rather have experienced guides handle the technical implementation while you focus on running your agency, we’d love to help. Our team has implemented this exact system for numerous agencies, and we know how to avoid the common pitfalls that can delay your success. Click here to schedule a call with us!
Whether you choose to implement this system yourself or work with our team, the most important thing is to start. Every day you continue with manual lead qualification is a day of lost productivity and missed opportunities.
The future of lead qualification is here—and it’s automated, intelligent, and continuously improving. The only question is: how soon will you make it your reality? Talk with us!
