Lead Scoring vs Time - Degrading Scores Gracefully

Most buyer activities are only relevant for a certain amount of time when you are looking at scoring leads. This is a very relevant factor to build into your lead scoring algorithms or you will find that scores continue to increase over time with mild activity. Obviously, that is not reflective of what you are trying to accomplish in most cases.

The simplest way to build time into your lead scoring algorithms is to layer together a few time frames of scoring. For example, you may be looking at something like email response, and you want recent responses to score higher than older responses, while very old responses add no score at all.

To do this, you might build two timeframes for scoring, one over six months, one over twelve months, each giving ten points of score for a response. These timeframes would naturally degrade the score over time. For example, as shown in the diagram, the email response three months ago receives 20 points, the email response nine months ago receives 10 points, and the email response 15 months ago receives 0 points.

Of course, in doing this, be sure to think through the "caps" of scoring that you apply to each bucket as discussed earlier.

This question is one of 8 critical lead scoring questions to consider when thinking about a lead scoring system.