Lead scoring: fit and intent on entry

Lead scoring, done usefully, is two questions answered the moment a lead arrives: how well do they match the clients you actually want (fit), and how ready are they to act (intent). Score both on entry, add the two numbers, and route the lead to a follow-up track that matches the total. That's the whole model — anything more elaborate tends to get built once and never consulted again.

Why score leads at all in a 5–50 person firm?

Because follow-up effort is finite and leads are not equal. A firm handling even twenty enquiries a month cannot give all twenty the same treatment without either burning the team's time on tyre-kickers or short-changing the genuinely good ones. In practice, most firms do neither deliberately — whoever shouts loudest gets the attention, which usually means the pushiest lead rather than the best one.

Scoring is the sorting mechanism that sits at the front of The 90-Day Follow-Up Framework: it decides who gets the phone calls and who gets the lighter email track, before anyone's judgement or mood gets involved. Without it, follow-up intensity is decided by whim; with it, the decision is made once, in policy, and applied every time.

What does "fit" actually measure?

Fit is a comparison against your ideal client profile, and it should be scoreable from information you can see or ask for at entry. For a typical UK B2B service firm, four checks cover most of it:

• Size — headcount or revenue in your serviceable band.
• Sector — one you have delivered for before, or deliberately want.
• Role — is the enquirer the decision-maker, or at least close to one?
• Problem match — is what they're describing something you actually sell?

Score each 0–2 and you have a fit score out of 8. The point is not precision; it's that a 7/8 and a 2/8 should visibly not receive the same follow-up, and today in most firms they do.

Fit is also the score that protects your margins. High-intent, low-fit leads are the most dangerous kind — they're keen, they're responsive, and they drag you into work you shouldn't be doing.

What does "intent" measure, and how do you read it on entry?

Intent is readiness to act, and the lead tells you most of it by how they arrived. When a lead books a call from your pricing page, then intent is high. When they reply to a cold email asking for a case study, then intent is moderate. When they download a guide and nothing else, then intent is low — for now. Add whatever they wrote: "we need this sorted this quarter" scores differently from "just researching options".

Three signals — source, action taken, and stated timeline — scored 0–2 each give you intent out of 6. Combined with fit, every lead lands in a simple grid:

The high-fit/low-intent quadrant is the one firms neglect, and it's where a well-designed 90-day nurture that doesn't nag earns its keep — these leads buy eventually, just not this week.

How does the score change what actually happens?

A score that doesn't change behaviour is decoration. The score should set three things automatically: response speed (top-quadrant leads get contacted within minutes — worth taking seriously given the industry rule of thumb that contact rates drop roughly eightfold after the first five), channel mix (calls for high scorers, email-only for low), and sequence length (full 90 days for high fit, a short courtesy track for low).

That routing only works if it's wired into the system rather than applied by hand, which is the subject of follow-up that runs from the CRM, not from memory. A score a human has to look up and act on is a score that gets skipped on busy weeks.

Where do firms overcomplicate this?

Two ways, reliably. First, too many variables: twenty-field scoring models with decimal weightings feel rigorous but nobody can explain why a lead scored 61 rather than 58, so the number loses authority and gets ignored. Seven inputs, whole numbers, done. Second, static scores: a lead scored in January and never rescored is misinformation by June. Rescore on every meaningful action — a reply, a visit back to the site, a second enquiry.

The broader principle is that a score is a feedback device, not a filing label — its job is to keep redirecting effort towards where it compounds, which is a small application of the ideas in A Systems-Thinking Guide for Founders. Start crude, inspect monthly whether high scorers actually close more often, and adjust the weights when the data disagrees with you.

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