B2B Marketing Glossary

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Lead scoring is a vital component of lead management, enabling B2B marketers to automatically qualify leads and measure the level of interest products and services.

Help perfect your lead scoring process by leveraging these terms and definitions:

BANT – The acronym for budget, authority, need, timeline— critical attributes that are used to determine the sales readiness of a lead

Company Score – The total score of all leads for a specific company. This may also be calculated by average. Also known as Account Score

Depreciation – The ability to automatically lower a lead score due to inactivity, status change, or any other attribute that signifies a decrease in the level of interest – sometimes known as Lead Degradation and Score Decay

Explicit Data – Information that a prospect provides that is unambiguous such as title, industry, company, etc.

Implicit Data – Information that is revealed by a prospect’s online behavior such as pages visited, and recency or frequency of visits

Lead Scoring – The process of determining the sales readiness of leads using a pre-determined scoring methodology and ranking them accordingly

Multiple Scoring – The ability to assign multiple scores to a lead, which can be useful for companies with multiple products or campaigns that need to be managed separately

Point Cap – A limit placed on a lead score to prevent scores from being inflated by repeated actions or triggers (e.g. multiple downloads of the same white paper)

Product Score – The score for a lead that indicates their interest in a specific product. An organization may capture multiple product scores

Qualified – The lead characteristic of being ready to engage with sales—a definition that is agreed upon by marketing and sales according to the profile of an “ideal” customer and a scoring methodology

Sales-Ready Leads (SRLs) – A lead that is ready for sales interaction, often decided by a lead score

Scoring methodology – The framework by which leads are scored (e.g. points, letter grades, etc.)

Threshold – A score used to determine whether or not a specific action should be taken on a lead

Trigger – An event based on a change or update in status, demographic information, or user behavior that causes a lead to proceed along a specific workflow branch or a new path entirely

Maria Pergolino, Senior Director of Marketing