6 CRM Lead Scoring Tools to Consider in 2024 

Every good sales team needs a great customer relationship management (CRM) tool backing them up. 

CRM software can help your sales teams track all prospects and customers throughout their journey, including in the lead-to-customer pipeline. You can store vital contact details, track their customer journey, and send (or automate) the follow-up process. 

Most great CRM tools offer sales-centric features like sales forecasting, offer customization, and, increasingly, lead scoring.

Lead scoring is an exceptionally useful feature that can help sales teams assess how likely a lead is to purchase (or how valuable they’re likely to be) so they can prioritize leads and follow up at the right time. 

As more CRMs are offering lead scoring features, it’s important to know which ones you can trust the most. In this post, let’s discuss six of the leading CRM lead scoring tools to consider in 2024 and why you may be better off with a dedicated lead scoring tool instead. 

What Are CRM Lead Scoring Tools? 

First, let’s answer this question: What are lead scoring tools and how do they work?

Most lead scoring works by creating a scoring system to assess the intent or potential value of prospects in your pipeline based on factors like their interactions with your brand or their firmographic traits. Each individual lead is given a score that tells your sales team how valuable that lead is, allowing your sales team to prioritize their efforts.

Many popular CRM tools are offering lead scoring functionality as part of their suite of tools. Most of these platforms have fairly basic lead scoring features that take a simplistic approach to evaluating prospects to help sales teams sell more. 

The CRM Lead Scoring Tools to Consider 

More and more CRMs are offering baseline-level lead scoring features. These are six of the best CRM-based lead scoring features in 2024. 

1. HubSpot 

HubSpot’s lead scoring feature is fairly straightforward and easy to use. It’s a rules-based platform, and it allows you to add both positive and negative criteria to add or remove points, respectively, if specific criteria is met.  

You can add both fit and activity criteria to your scoring model, all of which must add up to a potential max score of 100. This puts HubSpot’s CRM lead scoring tool as the first on our list, because unlike many other tools, it lets you account for lead firmographics and activity.

The biggest downside with this particular tool is that you have to choose between recency of interactions taken, or frequency of actions taken. So which matters more: The fact that a customer clicked on a landing page three times, or the fact that they did so six weeks ago vs. today? This can be limiting. 

See how to get the most out of HubSpot lead scoring. 

2. Salesforce 

Salesforce’s Einstein lead scoring is an AI-powered tool that helps you score leads based on past conversion patterns from your company’s customers. 

Einstein does start by analyzing all fields of lead information to look for common patterns, but you can manually remove any fields that you don’t believe to impact lead quality. The tool is capable of grasping certain complexities that many other tools will likely overlook, including interpreting different information values correctly.

For example, some businesses use different job titles to refer to the same position; Einstein would likely be able to track that by assigning certain jobs to categories, like “C-suite.” 

Einstein starts out using global models until there’s enough information from your own leads, at which point the tool creates models based on your customer data. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage; a global model is better than nothing, after all, but it’s also unlikely to be directly relevant to your business.

3. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign has both a lead scoring and a deal scoring tool, allowing you to create ranked scores for individual leads or in-progress deals.

This is another rules-based tool. Create specific rules for criteria, like gaining points if users submit a lead form. There are customizable lead scoring values, giving you more control over your model overall. You can also set up automation workflows based on high-intent actions taken throughout the customer journey, helping your sales team. 

The biggest downside to ActiveCampaign is that contacts only trigger rules in the scoring section one time. The actions aren’t cumulative, meaning frequency isn’t taken into account. 

4. monday.com 

monday.com’s CRM-based lead scoring tool is one of the more basic options on this list, but it’s a great CRM overall so we wanted to add it to our list.

When you’re reviewing your leads dashboard, you’ll see a “Lead Score” column. This is automatically generated by the platform, which is calculated by pulling lead data including job title, company revenue, and size of the company. 

According to monday.com, you can customize scoring criteria, though all the lead scores we’ve seen fall between 1-10, which isn’t quite as detailed as scores that either use a co-dynamic model or a more complex scoring system of 1-100. 

5. Zoho CRM 

Zoho CRM’s lead scoring tool allows you to configure multiple scoring rules with customized scoring criteria. If you want to give leads 3 points for opening an email and 6 points for booking a demo, this tool certainly makes it easy to do that. 

You can configure your lead dashboard to show you a lead score, which is automatically calculated based on your parameters.

As a bonus, you can create more than one scoring model here. You can create and configure scoring models for different types of contacts, including Leads, Accounts, Deals, Contacts, and Custom Modules. Each layout can have up to five rules, which is relatively restrictive, but at least there is some customization for different types of audiences. 

This CRM’s lead scoring tool does have a few potential concerns. You can, for example, choose to award a set number of points for every email opened. A lead, in theory, could subscribe to your “industry news” newsletter just for that content and never take any other actions, but still end up with a high score just from opening emails endlessly.

The restriction on rules is also worth considering. While we don’t believe that you need a lot of data points (and especially not when you get started), you want to have the option. 

6. Sugar CRM 

Sugar’s lead scoring feature is one of the only ones on this list that actually accounts for recency of lead actions taken, which is pretty substantial in our book. The scoring rules allow you to rescore a profile’s records after a certain number of days of inactivity, or to only score events that fit within a certain date. 

You can also set up score actions in order to define lead stages for scoring profiles, helping you track prospects throughout the customer journey. Track and score activity across your website, email, landing page, and custom events, alongside firmographic data.

The downside to Sugar CRM’s lead scoring, however, is that it’s a little clunky and not the most user-friendly. It was complicated to navigate, and with a lack of machine learning compared to other platforms, you’re relying on a heavily manual approach here. 

Why CRM Lead Scoring Tools Don’t Quite Cut It 

CRM lead scoring tools offer two distinct benefits: They’re relatively straightforward to use, and they’re convenient since they’re part of the CRM software you’re already using. 

It’s important to note that while all of the CRM lead scoring tools we’ve discussed can offer baseline lead scoring, none of them are capable of offering the kind of complex and actionable data that sales teams thrive on.

Most CRM-based lead scoring tools are simple. They might consider firmographic fit or a lead’s activity and interactions with your brand, but not both. And while they might consider activity, and potentially even how often users take a certain action, they might not factor in the recency of those actions. 

It’s also important to note that CRM lead scoring tools are all fairly one-note. You add in the scoring criteria, and that’s it; you typically don’t have the option to create multiple models or to test them thoroughly. 

As a result, you aren’t getting the crystal-clear actionable data that you need, because testing and nuance are two things we know that sales and marketing teams need. And that’s where Breadcrumbs can help. 

Final Thoughts: How Breadcrumbs Can Help 

Breadcrumbs is a dedicated tool that focuses exclusively on lead scoring. It is, pardon the pun, our bread and butter. 

Breadcrumbs was designed to account for all the nuance, complexity, and individuality that sales processes actually entail. And that means that unlike other lead scoring tools, we offer the following:

• Both firmographic fit and activity using a co-dynamic score, ensuring that you have a complete picture of each lead.
• Both recency and frequency are taken into account. If a lead schedules a demo, that’s a high-intent action… but it loses scoring power the longer you go since that action was taken. 
• Split testing features are easy to use, allowing you to test unique scoring criteria so you can create stronger and more reliable models over time, or as your business demographics change.
• Create multiple contact scoring models that go beyond just lead scoring, including those designed to identify upselling or cross-selling opportunities. 

And while Breadcrumbs’ lead scores don’t appear inside other tools CRMs, we do sync with data from multiple popular CRMs, including HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Salesforce, Mailchimp, and more. 

Because at the end of the day, you don’t want your sales team to be operating on data just because it’s convenient. You want that data to be accurate, actionable, and always up-to-date. 

Ready to unlock the true potential of lead scoring for your sales team? Start your free trial here.