Why Scoring Lead Fit and Engagement Separately in HubSpot is a Smarter Approach for Your Marketing

Lead scoring has been a staple in marketing for a while now. If you've been using traditional lead scoring in HubSpot, you know the basics: you assign points to a lead based on their behavior (like visiting your website or opening your emails), and when their HubSpot lead score hits a certain threshold, they’re handed off to sales. Simple, right? But what if I told you there’s a more effective way to score your leads in HubSpot—one that gives you a clearer picture of whether they’re really ready to buy?

HubSpot’s new lead scoring system takes things up a notch by separating lead fit from lead engagement, and it’s already proving to be a much more accurate way of assessing lead quality. Instead of lumping all behaviors and characteristics into one property, this new system allows you to track how well a lead matches your ideal customer profile and how engaged they are with your brand—each in its own scoring property. This is a lead-scoring best practice that can significantly improve HubSpot lead scoring.

At Pivot, we’ve used custom properties to separate fit and engagement for years. So when HubSpot rolled out this feature, we were excited to see it become even easier to set up and manage. We know it works, and now you can take advantage of this built-in feature to refine your lead scoring in HubSpot.

So, what makes this new system so much more powerful? Let’s break it down.

The Problem with Traditional Lead Scoring in HubSpot

In traditional lead scoring, everything—the lead’s job title, the size of their company, or how many emails they’ve opened—gets thrown into one HubSpot score property. This means that someone who isn’t the right fit for your product but is super engaged (maybe they just really love your content) could get a high score and be flagged as “ready” for sales. On the other hand, a perfect-fit lead who hasn’t interacted much yet might get overlooked because their score isn’t high enough.
The result? Your sales team spends time on leads that may not be a great fit, while genuinely qualified leads get left behind. This is a common HubSpot lead-scoring mistake to avoid.
That’s where separating lead fit and lead engagement comes in.

Why Separating Lead Fit and Lead Engagement is a Lead Scoring Best Practice

By scoring fit characteristics and engagement behaviors separately, you get a more accurate and balanced view of your leads. Here’s why that’s a big deal:

• Lead Fit tells you how well a lead matches your ideal customer profile. Things like job title, industry, company size, and even buying role (e.g., decision-maker or influencer) help you evaluate whether the lead is someone your sales team should be spending time on.
• Lead Engagement, on the other hand, measures how interested a lead is in your brand. This includes behaviors like website visits, email clicks, form submissions, and even social media interactions. Engagement shows you how “warm” the lead is, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the right fit.

By keeping these two scores separate, you avoid the common pitfalls of traditional lead scoring. For example:

• A lead with a high fit score but low engagement score might just need a little more nurturing from your marketing team before they’re ready for sales.
• Conversely, a lead with high engagement but low fit might be a fan of your content but not necessarily someone who would buy from you. Maybe they could be nurtured into advocates or referrals, but they shouldn’t be passed to sales just yet.

This approach not only makes your lead qualification process more accurate but also aligns your marketing and sales teams by ensuring that only the most promising HubSpot sales-qualified leads (SQLs) are passed along.

If you’re interested in diving deeper into how this new system works and how you can set it up for your business, check out our comprehensive guide: Lead Scoring with HubSpot: Simplifying Your Path to Smarter Lead Management. It walks you through everything you need to know to implement HubSpot lead scoring that really delivers.

Smarter Lead Scoring = More Sales-Ready Leads

Separating fit and engagement gives you a fuller picture of your leads and their stages in the buying journey. It’s about quality over quantity—identifying the right leads at the right time rather than just the ones who engage the most.

We’ve been working with custom lead scoring for years, so we know that figuring out how to optimize HubSpot lead scoring isn’t always straightforward. That’s why we created a step-by-step guide to help you out. If you’re ready to take a smarter approach to lead scoring, download our guide: Lead Scoring with HubSpot: Simplifying Your Path to Smarter Lead Management. It’s full of actionable lead-scoring tips to help you optimize your process and start seeing better results right away.

Need Help? Let’s Talk!

If you’re still not sure how to implement HubSpot’s new lead scoring system or want to fine-tune your current process, we’re here to help. At Pivot, we specialize in helping businesses make the most of HubSpot’s tools, including this new and improved way to score leads. Schedule a quick call with us today, and let’s chat about how we can make your lead scoring in HubSpot more effective.

And don’t forget to grab our guide: Lead Scoring with HubSpot: Simplifying Your Path to Smarter Lead Management, for more details on how to get started!