Lead scoring
Definition
Points the CRM adds to a contact, partly for fit with your ICP and partly for behaviour on your site and in your emails. Past an agreed threshold, the contact is handed to sales.
How it’s calculated
Each attribute and action carries a weight. Industry, company size and role score fit; page visits and email opens score behaviour. The weights are set by people, which is the thing to hold on to: the score is an opinion about what predicts a sale, written as arithmetic. It earns trust two ways: sales helped set the weights, and the scores have since been checked against which leads closed. A score that has never met the closed-won list is a guess.
What to watch for
Open the model and check whether a contact can cross the sales threshold on behaviour points alone. If reading enough emails outweighs matching the ICP, an engaged researcher who will never buy outranks a quiet director at a target account, and sales learns to distrust the queue. Then check what the score is wired to: if crossing the threshold changes nothing in routing or ownership, the score is decoration. And pull last year’s closed-won deals to see what each scored in the week before sales first touched it; a model that ranked them low has told you which weights to change.
The question you ask
“Can a contact reach the sales threshold on behaviour alone, without any fit points?”