A lead score is not a grade on a person.
It is a queue for your attention.
For founders whose leads arrive faster than anyone can follow up. This playbook is deciding which leads deserve a human's time: fit, intent, decay, the handoff to sales, and the audit that tells you whether the score was ever right.
// 34 PAGES · FIVE PARTS · THREE CHECKLISTS · FREE
Seven things to know about lead scoring.
Each is a mechanism you can plan around, and the guide is plain about the limit.
It rations the one resource you cannot scale
Marketing can produce interest at almost any volume; a person who can hold a good sales conversation can have a handful a day.
It turns the handoff into a contract instead of a mood
In most companies the moment a lead passes from marketing to sales is a source of permanent low-grade conflict. Marketing says it sent good leads; sales says the leads were rubbish; neither can prove it because nobody wrote down what "good" meant.
It separates who someone is from what they are doing
The single most valuable idea in lead scoring is that two entirely different questions are hiding inside "is this a good lead." The first is *fit*: is this the kind of person or company you can actually serve and who could plausibly pay.
It catches the quiet buyer
The people who announce themselves — who reply, who ask for a call — will be found without any system. The ones a score exists for are the others: the person who has come back four times in two weeks, read the pricing page twice and downloaded the guide that only serious buyers download, and has never said a word.
It forces you to write down what you believe buying looks like
Assigning points is uncomfortable because it makes you commit. You have to say, in public, that a demo request is worth more than a webinar registration and by roughly how much, that a visit to the pricing page means more than a visit to the blog, that a personal email address does or does not count against someone.
It improves, but only when it is audited against outcomes
A score is a hypothesis about which behaviour predicts a sale. Every closed deal and every lost one is a piece of evidence for or against that hypothesis.
And now the honest limit, because it should decide whether you build one at all
Lead scoring solves a volume problem. If you can personally read every new lead each week and decide what to do with it, you do not need a score yet — a founder's judgement, applied to every lead, beats any model you could write, because the founder sees context no rule can encode.
Five parts, and a last page.
Parts one to five are the thinking and the doing, worth your time even if you never touch a piece of software. The last pages show how to keep the model, the reasons and the outcomes in one place.
The honest case for scoring
Decide the model before you assign a point
Build it simply
Make it produce business
The checklists and the mistakes
Do it all in one place
Nine mistakes, all of them avoidable.
None is about the arithmetic. They are failures of definition and upkeep, which is good news, because both can be set up in advance.
Scoring before there is a volume problem
If a person can read every lead, a score is overhead that replaces good judgement with worse arithmetic.
Scoring engagement instead of buying
Without a written target, the model rewards your most enthusiastic readers, who are rarely your buyers.
Adding fit and intent into one number
The sum hides the one distinction sales most needs: is this person able to buy, or merely active.
Leaving repeatable signals uncapped
The score drifts into a traffic counter, and a loyal reader outranks someone who asked for a demo.
Making marketing-qualified reachable on passive signals
One missing condition and every regular newsletter reader gets handed to sales.
Handing over a number without reasons
A salesperson cannot open a conversation with a score, so they ignore it and go back to the inbox.
Never noticing the inputs drifted
A renamed tag or relaunched form silently zeroes a valuable signal, and the model decays with no error anywhere.
Keeping only today's score
Without the score at handoff, the audit is impossible, and the model stays exactly as good as the first guess.
Refitting on a handful of deals
A few closed customers have something in common by chance. Rebuild around them and you have fitted the model to noise.
Thirty-four pages.
Yours in one click.
Five parts, three checklists and the nine mistakes. One email with the link, no drip sequence, and we do not sell the list.