Wire lead scoring and the sales handoff so nothing rots in the gap
Wire lead scoring and the sales handoff so nothing rots in the gap
The most expensive failure in a marketing hub is invisible: a genuinely interested lead sits in marketing's database, nurtured forever, while the sales team never knows they exist. The handoff is where revenue leaks, and it leaks silently. Configure it as a real, agreed mechanism, not a hope that someone checks a list.
Agree the qualification bar with sales before you build the scoring, because lead scoring is only as good as the definition behind it. Sit down and decide together what an MQL actually is for this business: the fit attributes (right industry, right size, right role) and the behaviour (visited pricing, opened three emails, requested a demo) that together mean "worth a salesperson's time". Write it down, then encode it. Scoring built without that conversation produces a number sales ignores, which is worse than no scoring at all.
Build the score from both fit and intent, and let it decay. A contact who matches your ideal profile and just looked at your pricing page twice is hot. The same contact who went quiet for two months is cooling, so configure negative scoring and time decay rather than letting scores ratchet up forever. A score that only ever climbs eventually marks your entire database as hot, which tells sales nothing.
Make the handoff an automatic, accountable event. When a contact crosses the threshold, the workflow sets the lifecycle stage, assigns an owner, notifies that owner, and creates the task or the deal, all without a human remembering to do it. And close the loop back: when sales rejects a lead as not-a-fit, that feedback must flow to marketing so the scoring gets sharper over time. A handoff that only goes one way never improves.
Then watch the seam in the first weeks. The fastest way to find a misconfigured handoff is to track how long a fresh MQL waits before a human touches it. If qualified leads are aging untouched, the routing is broken somewhere, and it is far cheaper to catch that in week one than after a quarter of lost deals.
INTERVIEW EWOUD: Walk through a lead-scoring model you have built that actually worked. What signals made the cut, and what is your rule of thumb for setting the MQL threshold?