Liz Moorehead
This week, weβre finally giving HubSpot lead scoring the conversation it actually deserves. And not just because the feature is changing (although yes, the legacy lead score property is on its way out). Too many businesses are still building lead scoring systems that do nothing but create confusion, misalignment, and wasted time.
Weβve all seen it. A team with barely any traffic or conversions decides itβs time to implement lead scoringβ¦ why? Because it feels like the next thing to check off. But if youβre only getting five new contacts a month? Lead scoring isnβt your problem. Volume is.
At the same time, if your sales team is swimming in unqualified leads and has no way to prioritize, thatβs when lead scoring becomes essential. And the problem isnβt just whether youβre scoring or notβitβs how youβre doing it, what youβre basing those scores on, and whether anyone on your team can explain what the numbers actually mean.
π Go Deeper: Wait, We've NEVER Done an Episode on HubSpot Landing Pages?
This episode isnβt just about how the new scoring tool works, though we do break that down. Itβs about the strategy behind it: how to know when you're ready, how to build a system that reflects your actual customer journey, and how to avoid the common traps that make scoring a liability instead of an asset. Things like overly generous models that reward competitor activity. Or forgetting to build in decay. Or letting a lead score sit untouched for two years while your entire GTM strategy changes.
We also dig into what HubSpotβs new scoring tool makes possible: separating fit and engagement scoring, using associated objects and event groups to go way deeper, and even testing out AI-powered models in Enterprise. But as we kept coming back to, the tool is only as good as your inputs, and your inputs are only as good as your cross-team alignment.
If youβre still using a single legacy score property and hoping it magically tells your sales team whoβs ready to buy? This episode is your wake-up call.
Keywords
HubSpot lead scoring, HubSpot scoring tool, fit vs engagement scoring, lead prioritization, HubSpot CRM, sales and marketing alignment, HubSpot automation, HubSpot AI, customer journey mapping, contact scoring, HubSpot workflows, buyer intent signals, HubSpot lifecycle stages, HubSpot segmentation, HubSpot reporting
What We Cover
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What Lead Scoring Actually Is (and Isnβt): We start with the basic definitionβHubSpot lead scoring assigns a numerical value to contact behavior and attributesβbut also why itβs better to think of it as a prioritization system, not a silver bullet.
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When to Start Lead Scoring (And When Not To): Max shares horror stories of teams with no traffic, no conversions, and zero strategy insisting on building elaborate lead scoring systems. We talk through how to know when your business is actually ready.
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The Difference Between Fit and Engagement Scores: The new tool separates fit and engagement, and itβs a game-changer. We break down why the old all-in-one scoring model was a messβand how this new approach supports smarter segmentation and clearer handoffs.
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Common Mistakes in Lead Scoring Strategy: From failing to document what a score actually means to building overly positive scoring models that reward competitor activity, we go deep on what not to do when setting up your system.
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The Importance of Thresholds, Decay, and Clarity: Lead scores that donβt change over time lose value. We talk about using decay, setting clear action thresholds (like Georgeβs RadarβResearchβRevenue model), and educating your team on how to use the numbers.
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HubSpotβs New Scoring Tool and Whatβs Changing: The legacy scoring property is going away. We explain whatβs new, whatβs better, and how to start thinking about your five available scores in Proβand the extra functionality available in Enterprise.
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AI-Assisted Lead Scoring: If youβre on Enterprise, you can now create AI-assisted scoring models. We discuss what HubSpotβs AI is analyzing, how it trains models, and whether AI-generated scores are really ready to hand off to your sales team.
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Associated Objects, Custom Criteria, and Event Groups: The new scoring tool lets you go deep. George breaks down how to score based on behavior tied to associated objects (like event attendance) and how to structure scoring logic that actually mirrors your buyer journey.
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Why βSet It and Forget Itβ Doesnβt Work: One of the biggest failures we see? Teams build lead scoring once, never update it, and wonder why it doesnβt reflect their actual campaigns. We talk about how to build a scoring system that evolves with your business.
And so much more ...
Episode Transcript
Liz Moorehead: [00:00:00] Welcome back. We're all together again.
Chad Hohn: Yay.
George B. Thomas: Yeah.
Liz Moorehead: long
George B. Thomas: It feels like it's been a minute.
Liz Moorehead: I know. How's everybody's weekend?
George B. Thomas: Good.
Max Cohen: It was good.
Chad Hohn: Quite lovely.
Liz Moorehead: Okay. I gotta be honest, guys.
Max Cohen: I don't remember what I did
Liz Moorehead: I don't know if we're all just like missing each other a lot, but y'all are way too polite right
George B. Thomas: she, she's gonna say Turn up the heat. Yeah,
Chad Hohn: Uh oh.
Liz Moorehead: just a little bit.
Max Cohen: my weekend. Honestly,
George B. Thomas: Hey, there we go. Now we're back to the show.
Liz Moorehead: Yeah. Well I had a really great burrito this weekend, so suck it Max.
Max Cohen: Oh,
Liz Moorehead: I know.
Max Cohen: I'd like to suck a burrito right now.
George B. Thomas: I
Liz Moorehead: I would like to note for the record, I did not say that. I did not
George B. Thomas: yeah, that was, that was dancing on the edge of whoopsie.
Max Cohen: You pushed us down this path and now we have
George B. Thomas: and, and Max said Yes. I'll go there quite quickly.
Max Cohen: they've been saying a lot lately around and find out. Okay.
Chad Hohn: there's a, [00:01:00] there's a lot of ffo going on.
Max Cohen: Yeah. Yep.
George B. Thomas: my goodness.
Liz Moorehead: Sounds like a gourmet popcorn. And speaking of gourmet popcorn, guess what we're talking about this week, guys. Look at that segue. Did you see it horrifying, like a car wreck? I know it's been a
Max Cohen: Lead scoring.
George B. Thomas: Oh, is that what we're talking about?
Max Cohen: Yep.
George B. Thomas: thought we were talking about popcorn today.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Liz Moorehead: Now I'm hungry. We're talking about lead scoring. I don't know how we've gotten this far in this podcast without talking about it, especially given the fact that we had literally what. Two episodes with, uh, bastion Paul from Hub lead.io talking basically about the strategy behind this very topic, which is you get leads into your happy little HubSpot house.
How do you know when they're ready? How do you know where they are in their buyer's journey? How do you know when it should go from marketing to sales? But George, you also mentioned [00:02:00] that you were excited to talk about this topic because they've rolled out. Some changes to HubSpot lead scoring, which we're gonna be getting to.
So we're gonna be doing a bit of a two for today, y'all. We're gonna be talking about strategy and we're gonna be talking about the tools itself. But George, I wanna start with you. You are always my favorite person to come to with this question. 'cause you're the guy known for simplifying the complex.
That's your thing. what is the simple definition of what HubSpot lead scoring is?
George B. Thomas: I mean, honestly, when I get asked that question, Liz, my brain gets torn in two different directions. Go figure one. I feel like it can be like, um, Johnny Depp and you know, the drunk, uh, pirate, but also it can be a treasure map. Like at the end of the day when I think of lead scoring, it's a system that simply a, some points to, and I hate this word more and more that I hang out with Chris, Carolyn.
To leads, but let's just call 'em humans. It assigns points to humans. [00:03:00] Although in the new tool that we're gonna talk about, it could be humans contacts, or it could be companies, organizations. So, so you have to think about that subtle difference again. We'll, we'll talk about like what went away or what is going away to what is now here, but, but think of this like assigning points to a human or organization.
Based on things like visiting a pricing page or downloading a white paper, or maybe it's based on attributes, again, something different. Um, there's multiple types of scores that you could be doing because you could do something like job title or industry and, and now you're getting these kind of different scores.
So think numbers, think humans. Think, uh, the, maybe the higher the number, the possibly the better fit is probably about the easiest way that I can say that. You could look at a [00:04:00] number that might be a slight indicator to if that human is more ready to purchase or buy, then somebody who has a potentially lower number.
So it comes down to prioritization of the humans. Based on an indicator that is numeric. Is that simple enough? I, I hope
Max Cohen: I got, I got another one thing. Do something thing be something. Number. Go up.
Liz Moorehead: Or down.
Chad Hohn: With configurability. Yep. You can. Yeah, you can configure it.
Max Cohen: can we
Liz Moorehead: You know,
Max Cohen: of your t-shirt that
Liz Moorehead: as the resident
Max Cohen: Configurer,
Liz Moorehead: blood is not coming out of my ears. This is fine. This all sounds like the English language, and I'm fine.
Max Cohen: they do something, think be
Liz Moorehead: It do be that way
George B. Thomas: new words are
Max Cohen: number goes some way
Chad Hohn: Yeah. Yeah, I think it's, uh, configurable is really the big point. Like that number goes up or down based on what you decide. I. Then [00:05:00] we'll also be able to talk about this later. There's an AI component depending on how much, uh, big money cheddar you shell out to that big sprocket.
George B. Thomas: You had to go there already, but Okay. We'll, we'll get there later. We'll get there later. Um, yeah,
Chad Hohn: I just wanted to tease him for what's to come.
George B. Thomas: it, yeah, it's, it's coming. Trust me. 'cause I have feelings.
Liz Moorehead: How many feelings though? How many feelings though? Like five 17.
Chad Hohn: I've got a feeling
Max Cohen: It's some configurability number.
George B. Thomas: Yeah.
Liz Moorehead: I love it.
George B. Thomas: It's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a configurable number depending on how this conversation goes.
Liz Moorehead: God. Okay, so, all right, moving along. When do you actually need to start thinking about lead scoring and HubSpot? Is there such a thing as starting too early or a as.
Max Cohen: It is definitely such a thing as starting too early. Like, I don't remember. Heck, when I was onboarding people, people haven't r wrote a blog post yet, get getting no leads whatsoever. And them [00:06:00] being like, we need to shut up this complex fleet scoring, uh, thing.
Chad Hohn: You're gonna score exactly how many people.
Max Cohen: I'm like, what are we scoring?
You're refereeing a game. That's not happening. My guy. Like, what the fuck are we doing? Um, and it was, sorry. Yeah. Um, I remember, I remember I had this like. Really brutal client that he, he came in and he was like the consultant or something for this like big pharmaceutical company that was like about to get off the ground.
And um, he's like, all I need to do is set up lead scoring. I'm like, my guy, this thing is even connected to a domain. My dude, like, what is going on? And we literally spent all of onboarding setting up. The most complex lead scoring, uh, functionality I've ever seen. And I don't think they, I think at the end of it, he just, he quit or something.
Like, it was so stupid. It was so
Chad Hohn: This is back at like the score property version, right? The old school version?
Max Cohen: yeah. But like the, [00:07:00] you know, I think it's that that truth still holds the same today, right? Um, you, you definitely can do it too early. I mean, really the. The, the reason you need, to me, the big reason, and I'm sure there's others, but the biggest reason that you need any sort of lead score or you need to think about it, is when you need to start thinking about prioritization of said contacts, companies, whatever it may be for some reason, whether it's, uh, you know, um, something as simple as, oh, you know, uh, Jamie, the sales rep needs to be able to sort through all the leads they get in a day and prioritize the most engaged or.
Um, you wanna build some sort of automation that says, oh, if score X equals certain threshold and they haven't done X, y, z, uh, do something. Right? But, you know, usually, uh, usually I feel like you don't need lead scoring unless you've gotten some of the other stuff. Right. Really well. Um, like if you really nail down content, you [00:08:00] really nail down driving the right traffic, you really nail down conversion and like.
You've got a lot of people trying to take the time of your customer facing folks, that's when you need to think about it, not
Chad Hohn: Yeah. Yeah.
George B. Thomas: I, I think the, the way that I would say this is the moment in time that the lead generation, meaning the amount of, uh, let, let's go there. The amount of humans that are interested in your stuff, eclipses your, uh, team's ability to have human conversations at scale.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
George B. Thomas: It's like if you get, if you're getting five leads a month, Jimmy can keep up. Okay? If, if you're getting 20 leads a month, Jimmy and Susie can keep up. Right now, if you're getting 500 leads a month, Jimmy and Susie might need some dang help. And so understanding the right fit [00:09:00] or the high score. Or in a perfect world high score and fit. Now all of a sudden, Jimmy and Susie can at least start at a place that might equal success quicker.
Liz Moorehead: Okay, so I'm making this face for a reason because I agree with what's being said here. And the
Max Cohen: about to not agree.
George B. Thomas: Is it, is it an and or a, but Is it an and or a, but,
Liz Moorehead: it's neither. It's a question. I wanna clarify something here because here's the disconnect I have. We have had multiple conversations where we've encouraged Chad, I saw that
George B. Thomas: You in trouble dude. You in trouble now?
Liz Moorehead: If he giga Chads later, he knows I'm forgiving him. So it doesn't matter. Um, but here's the thing. We have had multiple conversations with guests and without about the importance of marketing and sales, getting on the same page about how leads are qualified as early as possible. So now we're saying though, that those conversations [00:10:00] should happen as early as possible, but the implementation, you may be, wanna be more strategic about when you put that into HubSpot.
So it's not a, it's not a but or an, and I'm just trying to understand where that bifurcation occurs.
George B. Thomas: you can know that somebody's qualified without a score.
Liz Moorehead: Well, okay, so yes. And now we're, yes, ending that answer changes depending on whether you're not, you're talking to marketing and sales. Like again, I gotta go back to that conversation with Bas and Paul, where you will have a marketing team member saying, this is sales qualified. Why haven't you followed up with them and this, and then if someone in sales will say they're about as sales qualified as sentient cactus, like, what?
What are we doing here? Right. So. That's
George B. Thomas: A sentient cat. This
Chad Hohn: A Ssus, if you will.
Liz Moorehead: George, help.
Chad Hohn: Got him.
George B. Thomas: Gotti,
Liz Moorehead: Got him.
George B. Thomas: uh, I mean, I mean, listen, listen. Yes. There, [00:11:00] so I, here's. And I don't want this
Liz Moorehead: see my
George B. Thomas: super complex. Yeah. I don't want this to get super complex, but like, when I think about this, there are, there are levels of qualification, right? When I, when I talk to an organization, it might be like, Hey, um, what are the job titles of your ideal, uh, client profile?
Um, what is the, you know, amount of yearly revenue that they should be making? What are, what are the, you know, and you could go persona, or you could go ideal client profile, but there's some high level things that air quotes, qualify them before we actually have to sit down and figure out this, like, scoring conversation that we're having today.
So I want, I just want everybody to, to realize, and they already do this, there's, there's a pre this and then there's, when do you take time to do and use the tools that we're talking about today? That's the differentiator that I would say is like at, [00:12:00] at the end of the day, by the way, most sales reps who are killing it, it's probably a lot of like intuition and just historical understanding of like, I can tell they're a right fit.
So that's why I am saying, when you get to the point where you, uh, you know, here's the thing you ever get like. You've been to a party. There's 10 people. There's 10 people you know. You know everybody's name, you know everybody's name. That's in different part. That's, that's one party. You ever been to a party where it's like 50, 60 people and you're overwhelmed and you're like, why did I come here?
That's a different kind of party. What I'm saying is the organizations that are at a party of 10. They're just gonna be able to know who they're supposed to talk to and realize, oh, I'm jelling with this person. You would get into a party of 50 or 60, you're not real sure you're back in the corner. And if I could put a lead score on all [00:13:00] above all of those humans heads in that 60 to 70
Chad Hohn: Sorry, I only talked to 80 and a higher.
George B. Thomas: yeah, I'd know where to head.
Right. So it's, yeah.
Liz Moorehead: I feel like I could end up derailing this conversation, so I'm going to accept this answer for now. It still feels a little gray still. No, it still feels a little, I, I totally get what you're saying, George. I think depending on the size of your organization and how. What the influx is, you can kind of skirt the edges on when that conversation takes place.
But, and I'll put it a pin in it here, I think it is a very delicate moment of figuring out when the time is to strike. Because as we've seen specifically with HubSpot, people will say, I don't need a process now until they realize crap, I needed to process six months ago.
Chad Hohn: Yeah.
George B. Thomas: Yes, and I would say it's the size of your organization and there's some type of probably mathematical equation that could be added here and the size of your audience.[00:14:00]
Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm.
George B. Thomas: And I don't mean audience just as like subscribers to your blog, but like audience of like humans actively
Chad Hohn: tam. Yeah,
George B. Thomas: yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chad Hohn: your actual tam. Like all the people who want the thing you sell. Right? I mean, I think that's like one of the things is, um, when you really look at it. Uh, two things can be true at the same time, I suppose, right? Like, you can have that conversation here or you can have it here depending on what's best for what it is that you're trying to accomplish.
I mean, I think, um, you know, going back to the, the original question there, it's like, like, when do we really implement this? It's like if our leads are a graveyard, you know, we have nobody kicking around in there. It's just desolate. Obviously we don't need scoring, just like Max said, you know, and like when it comes to if our, if our reps are drowning and they're wasting their time with like twenties and thirties and forties, like we might know that these 20 and 30 and 40 prospect [00:15:00] people, I. They might fit our profile of who we'd like to sell to, but they're not engaged. And you know, they maybe filled out a form one time six months ago, you know? But if we don't have any kind of lead scoring, well they're gonna be like, I. Going for that person just as much as somebody who freshly filled out a form five seconds ago.
Right. And I think that's just the differentiator. Uh, like they might bulk be well qualified people who fit our tam, who fit our ICP, but this person's like, you know, live and kicking. And that one's been like dead on the hook for a long time. Right.
Liz Moorehead: Okay. All right, let's move on. We've talked about what we should be doing. We've talked about when we should be doing it. Now I want to hear about the biggest mistakes you see people make when they're setting up their HubSpot lead scoring. Hub
George B. Thomas: Max Chad
Liz Moorehead: hub.
Max Cohen: I think that, yeah, I think that the. Today since they, 'cause what do they do? They split it between fit and [00:16:00] um, uh, engagement. Right.
Chad Hohn: fit, engagement.
Max Cohen: I think solved the biggest problem that I had seen for years. Um, bef like back before this tool came out, and it was just the, the scoring properties, right? Is that people would, um.
Use a single number to measure two completely different things. Like fit is not the same as how engaged are you, right? And so they build these like elaborate lead scores that were like, oh, did they, they opened this email and their job title contains CFO. And it's like, well, what caused the points to go up?
Like, are they engaged or are they a good fit or likely neither. Right. Um, so I think the, the split definitely kind of like solved what I think was one of the more, you know, core, uh, core issues. Right. And I'd say the other, you know, other mistake you make is just like doing it too early and wasting [00:17:00] too much time and brain power on it that you could be spending somewhere else.
Chad Hohn: Yeah. Well, I mean, if you're, um, like if your salespeople are. We're like having a hard time knowing even who the right humans or companies are in the first place in your portal. Like you don't even have the back, uh, backing processes to sell set up, but they have like a ton of people in the portal and they don't even know who's who.
I mean like you gotta solve that problem. The business logic problem, the user experience problem in your HubSpot, the training problem in your HubSpot before you could even consider jumping into the score. And then like, making it way too complicated. Like don't, you know, make your, in the new version of the tool, you could set your max score.
As high as you want. Don't make it like a thousand necessarily, right? Like a zero and 100 score feels good between, for people like, hey, zero and a hundred is like just an easy round number and [00:18:00] it's like normal. And I think just making it not too complicated. And then, um, you know. I think, uh, if you, with the new version, if you don't implement like the score decay, then they may have had a bunch of engagement, but you want that.
That score to tick down if it's way too old of activity so that it helps that engagement score, um, you know, work properly to tell you about the fact that yeah, they did things, but they haven't done anything recently. Right. And so it's just like a nice identifier. Um, you know, and, and depending on what your marketing efforts are, I think that's what drives how you want to build that engagement calculation, uh, because it's unique to every portal, right?
Um, it's unique to every business and their, their strategy.
George B. Thomas: So I agree with everything that Max and Chad have said so far, but I wanna almost, I feel like back up 50,000 foot view. And one of the, I have two by the way that [00:19:00] I wanna mention here. One of the biggest mistakes that I've seen is people will set it and forget it. Um, they'll, you know, you can't just throw some rules in, walk away and like expect it to work forever, especially when you're probably dropping one or two new campaigns per quarter or per month depending on your organization.
Yet now you're not scoring anything of the new that you actually created. So like, it's gotta be this like growing piece. Also, like Chad, you mentioned the score of a hundred, but then I'm like, man, if I had a score of a hundred, like what are the limited actions that I could actually score to get somebody to a hundred?
Like should it be more? And, and that leads me to my second thing that I think people do wrong is they not, not the a hundred by the way, just the, the score in general is like, what the F does the number mean?
Chad Hohn: Yeah.
George B. Thomas: Like, what, what does the number mean? Like, great, it says 89. I don't know what that means. And historically, I've had this thing that I've taught [00:20:00] called radar research revenue, which will break down, uh, this idea of like, let's say it's a score of a thousand.
Okay, well, 250 to whatever means they should be on your radar. Well, what does that even mean? Well, it means that you should probably be just like. You don't have to really put a lot of effort, but it, the, the cream is rising to the top right. Um, you know, then you get to maybe like 500 and all of a sudden they're, uh, you know, research radar, research revenue.
Yeah. So their research, well, what does that mean? Well, now you might wanna go look at their social channels, or you might wanna go look at their website, or you might have like. A defined process that you have when it comes to like understanding if it's time to like get them into a, a questionnaire or a survey or a certain workflow that like gets them to convert a couple times to get them specific information that you are trying to research.
And then you get to this level that maybe it's seven 50, it's like revenue. Well, what happens? Well, you get an internal notification. We should have driven [00:21:00] revenue yesterday because they've, they could sell our issue to us. They know, they know they've read 50 blogs, they've converted on seven forms, like, and so like having these action item ideas, these buckets around what a score gets to, and then actually having actions, like we literally built like lists and emails and workflows all around.
This thing that is radar research revenue. So you could take action upon the information once it's delivered to you based on what HubSpot is doing.
Liz Moorehead: That is a
Chad Hohn: sounds involved.
Liz Moorehead: it sounds involved, and it's a much more detailed answer to my version of my answer, which is I am. Amazed. This is my simple version of this answer. It's not documented. Nobody documents their lead scoring. Nobody documents and shares it. Nobody documents it in a way that is digestible and understood by [00:22:00] all.
They just make the score and then expect people to understand it. I have been at, I have worked with and been with numerous organizations. Where that has somehow been the case? Well, they're like, well, it's a high number. We assume they just know it's like 75 could mean anything.
Max Cohen: What's a high number?
Chad Hohn: Right?
Liz Moorehead: of, well, for a few of them, they assumed like, well, the best score would be a hundred. And so they're like 75, obviously. Duh. And I'm like, that's not how many, any of that works. And then also another really maybe overly simplistic one is. I love that they had the fit, not fit, but for a long time there people were just focused on putting score attributes that were positive. And so you'd end up with competitors who are all over your website and being very active.
'cause they're very curious in what your content is and they look like the
Chad Hohn: Oh
Liz Moorehead: lead of all time, but they are a competitor. So little things like that.
Max Cohen: Yeah, and like the, it's, it's really, really important. [00:23:00] If it's a, what's the, I guess, how would you say this? I don't wanna say if it's a customer facing, if it's a user facing or like a, a rep facing score. I. Where it's like, okay, there is a number. You are going to see the number on a record. This is what it tells you, right?
Like, it's really important to educate people on that because like, again, how are they gonna know, well, what's a high score? Like what if the score goes up to 500? What if it goes to a thousand? What if it's infinite? What if it's whatever? Right? Um, you know, you, you should want to be able to like tell people like, Hey, this is the, you know, threshold you wanna look at.
If it's this, if it's that, um. I forget. Do they let you color code 'em now
Chad Hohn: Yeah, the new, that's exactly what I was gonna say is the new version of the scoring property has color coded thresholds
Max Cohen: That's pretty
Chad Hohn: essentially level off so you, you know, whatever your max score is, you say like zero to 50 is low, or 51 to 75 is medium. And it's like a, you know, just like you [00:24:00] can with the dropdown properties these days as well, you can implement the tags or the labels or the colors.
Max Cohen: And that's. That's a really easy way to tell people it's a good number without necessarily putting them through a big training saying what
Chad Hohn: That was one of my favorite, favorite parts about like in reporting. I know this is just a tangent, but like when gauge visualizations came out and you could put the bands and gauge visualizations and just give red, yellow, green, or whatever colors you want in that gauge visualization, it tells you if you are within your KPI target.
Or not, it's like immediately able to make somebody who doesn't know how it's calculated, um, understand that you're at least in the zone. Now, they might not know how to make it go up or down, but they know it's in the zone. Now, one last thing I wanna mention too is like, you know, the deal score. On deals, that's the newer feature that they've added.
That's really helpful because it tells you [00:25:00] little pluses and minuses as to what made it go up and down. And if I'm not mistaken on this current score property, you still kind of have to look at the details or the history of the property to see what made it go up and down. But I hope that maybe it'll come into like its own custom card that's similar to, um.
To that kind of a function like it is on the deal score, right?
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Liz Moorehead: Well, let's stick with the tool here for a minute. Um, George, I wanna turn it over to you because there are some of us who have been in the HubSpot portal game for a really long time. Some of us who may be new, but what is new with the HubSpot Lead scoring tool? What's happening in
George B. Thomas: it, it's, it's a whole new tool, by the way. 'cause that's one thing that we probably should have said at the very beginning of this episode is like. If you have HubSpot, uh, property score in place, you need to go and revisit that real quick, like, because it's getting [00:26:00] ready to sunset, which means any system that you have historically built on a, that, uh, that property is just not going to, uh, wor work anymore.
And so, um, instead of a property, it is a, a real tool. When I say it's a real tool, what I mean is it is a tool that one, if you have enterprise, you could create a score with ai. Uh, in pro you can't do that. But if you, uh, have pro, you can literally create a contact engagement score. You can create a contact fit score, and these engagement or FIT scores could be based off of contacts or companies I alluded to, that it could be human or organization at the beginning of this episode.
Again, if you have enterprise, you could even create a contact combined score, which by the way, that right there gets real interesting because it's like, uh,
Chad Hohn: It goes right back to the [00:27:00] original problem Max just mentioned.
George B. Thomas: It's the right for them and it's the right for us, and it's all in one kind of score. Um, and so there's a, there's a higher level of granularity.
Uh, or a deeper level of granularity that you can go to when you're actually creating these, um, scores because you have these things list called event groups, and then in an event group you can add criteria. Um, and this could be anything from like calls to CTAs to documents to like. Then you could even get into like web events and then you can literally filter the web events on like page visited.
But then after that you can even filter it down further than that and like you can add timeframes and you can add frequencies. And so like you quickly realize that this is not just a, um, positive attribute, add five points. Negative attribute minus 100 [00:28:00] points. Like it's way, way past that. Um, you even have a thing in here where you can score every time, or you can limit to certain things as well.
So again, I, I would just say like, and actually, what was that word? Custom of whatever cus
Max Cohen: Configurability.
George B. Thomas: configurable. Yeah,
Chad Hohn: configurability.
George B. Thomas: yeah. Configurability. The configurability. Of this thing to what you're trying to do. Now, here's one thing I will say. Um, warning, I need a, if you're on, if you're on pro, if you're on pro, you get, uh, five scores.
Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm.
George B. Thomas: So you gotta be real careful of like the, the five ways that you're gonna implement this. Unless you know that you're just gonna put five in place because you're gonna add more. When you go to enterprise, that's not a sales pitch. I'm just letting you know, like the limitation here [00:29:00] is one without ai, uh, or with ai, it's enterprise.
With that multi score, it's enterprise. And if you're not on enterprise, you get five scores.
Chad Hohn: And on that AI assisted one, it's supposed to like, analyze successful conversations, is kind of the tagline of what it, what it, what they say. So like, it's supposed to look at things that influence the likelihood to close and help try and recommend, and it like, you know, even in the doc, like the, uh, even the paywall, it shows like, oh, we're training a model.
Right, if you're looking at the paywall. Um, but they're like. Trying to make the advanced scoring as intuitive as possible. I'm not exactly sure how that AI piece works with the combined score. If it helps like alleviate the issue of the original score property, which was both the fit and engagement score, or if maybe that's one that would be best used in the [00:30:00] background for kind of the marketing team to get an overall health or score of the contact, but maybe not, you know.
Work with the sales team, or maybe that one would be better for the sales team. I'm not too sure. Um, also the, with those legacy score properties, July 1st, 2025, you're no longer gonna be able to edit your existing score properties. And then apparently August 31st, they're deprecating them entirely, I think.
Right. Or they'll stop updating. 'cause they're basically like lists in a property, multiple lists in a property or something like that is how they used to work.
George B. Thomas: and you can find out more information on that. And I'm, I'm just doing this because you should be checking this out anyway, in the right hand side, drop down, there's product updates. You can go to product updates and you can look at the score property, sunset information. If you are somebody who has that score property in place right
Chad Hohn: Yeah. Your, your workflows, if you're using it in a workflow, your workflows actually page throws it up in lights and it's like, Hey, you're [00:31:00] still using this. Check it out.
George B. Thomas: Yeah. Yep.
Liz Moorehead: Is there anything that we wish was different with the tool?
Max Cohen: Um, I wish it, I wish it locked it out until you've successfully used other tools.
Liz Moorehead: Like you have to earn it like a final
Max Cohen: fucking
Chad Hohn: Yeah, it's
Max Cohen: you gotta earn it. Sorry.
Chad Hohn: like, like a game unlock. That's amazing.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Chad Hohn: You have to get these three achievements before you can even start working on that
Max Cohen: X amount of leads to unlock this tool. It's like I paid for it. Exactly.
Chad Hohn: That's amazing.
Max Cohen: Performance based. It's a performance based DLCI.
George B. Thomas: you know what I would do? I would ask the, I would ask the listeners. Is there something currently that they wish that it would do because then they could let us know? I I, I feel like it'd be.
Max Cohen: yeah, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I feel like, um, I tried to use it a while ago to be like, oh, like [00:32:00] how would I go use that new lead scoring tool to say, um, you know, if a person went to like an event, give 'em a score. And the way I was like, gonna try to do that is say like. If, if the contact is associated to a custom object of a certain name with a certain label at a point, I don't think I was able to access like associated object data to build a score, but this was a long time ago, so I dunno if they've
Chad Hohn: Yeah, the the new one, you can do associated object information for your score. It's
Max Cohen: custom objects too?
Chad Hohn: If I'm not mistaken, I was just looking at building a score property a minute
Max Cohen: Yeah, I mean, it is been a while since I looked at it, so it wouldn't surprise me if they built it in.
Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm.
Max Cohen: No,
Liz Moorehead: Gentlemen, if you can believe it, we've come to the end of our time together.
George B. Thomas: wow.
Liz Moorehead: Yeah, I know.
Max Cohen: I literally can't believe it.
George B. Thomas: Yeah.
Liz Moorehead: help us land the
Chad Hohn: Yeah, for the FIT score it can,
Max Cohen: Sick.
Chad Hohn: sorry, I had to interrupt it 'cause I had to tell, I had to tell Max that it could be done. I'm sorry. I.
Max Cohen: So it's fit instead of [00:33:00] engagement. That actually makes a lot of sense. Okay.
Chad Hohn: Yep. Okay. We're done by
George B. Thomas: Knowledge,
Liz Moorehead: George.
George B. Thomas: that Lord
Liz Moorehead: What is your between one and 27 things you want our listeners to remember from this episode today?
Chad Hohn: 28, please.
George B. Thomas: no one thing. Um. Maybe. Um, so I'm torn. I actually, it's funny, Liz, you know me so well. I'm, I'm kind of torn because my initial knee jerk response is like, when creating lead scoring for your organization, please document it and train on it. Like that's the first knee jerk response of like, do that. But the other thing I would say is like.
There's probably a large set of listeners that haven't even dipped their toe into this bad boy.
Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm.
George B. Thomas: And so the other side of my brain goes to, um, you know, don't just ignore it like Max [00:34:00] even in, in this episode. Well, it's been a while since I've used it or looked at it.
Chad Hohn: Sure.
George B. Thomas: HubSpot is really good at not being the HubSpot that you tested.
HubSpot is really good at not being the HubSpot that you used six months ago. And so anybody listening out there that is like, ah, that thing's janky 'cause they looked at it when it was in beta. It's time to re-look at it and think about is it the right time for you to start using lead scoring in your organization?
And if so, build a process. Document it. Train it and actually go forward and use it for what it's meant to be used for, instead of just a piece of your navigation that you ignore, like it doesn't exist.
Chad Hohn: Blake HubSpot project.
George B. Thomas: Ooh,
Max Cohen: Oh God.
George B. Thomas: shots fired.
