How to Implement a More Effective Lead Scoring Model with ABM

Despite its importance, only 39% of businesses use lead qualification criteria in their lead generation process, leaving many opportunities untapped or misaligned because their lead scoring system and methodology are not fully developed in their marketing campaigns.  

Lead scoring helps sales and marketing teams rank prospects based on fit, behavior, and likelihood to buy. In account-based marketing (ABM), it still plays a vital role by highlighting engaged individuals who may act as your “brand champions.” However, ABM requires a broader view—one that accounts for the full buying committee, not just single leads. 

That’s where account scoring comes in. Instead of evaluating contacts in isolation, account scoring looks at the collective engagement across all stakeholders within a target account. When multiple contacts show activity—like attending events, reading content, or requesting demos—it signals stronger intent and a level of interest. 

By combining lead and account scoring, you get a clearer picture of both individual and group readiness, allowing you to identify marketing qualified accounts (MQAs), prioritize outreach, and better align with sales on how to keep accounts moving toward a decision. 

What Is Lead Scoring? 

Lead scoring is a technique used by sales and marketing teams to rank prospects based on how likely they are to make a purchase. By evaluating factors such as demographic details, research behavior, and engagement with content, teams can assign numerical scores that help identify high-potential leads and guide outreach efforts more effectively. We bucket scoring into two key areas: Fit Score, which looks at demographics and firmographics of leads and accounts, and Engagement Score, which looks at the behaviors of the leads and accounts with your content. 

As an ABM marketer, lead and account scoring is essential to how you qualify prospects and prioritize outreach. By assigning point values based on firmographic data, historical data, engagement signals, and buying intent, you can quickly identify which accounts are most likely to convert—and deserve more focused attention. This scoring framework helps you strengthen sales and marketing alignment on what a qualified lead or account looks like, so you’re not wasting time on low-potential opportunities with negative scoring. Instead, you can direct your efforts toward high-value targets, improve efficiency across teams, and drive more predictable revenue from the accounts that matter most. 

How ABM Changes the Lead Scoring Landscape 

In traditional demand generation, lead scoring helps prioritize outreach by evaluating individual engagement and fit. While this model works well in B2C or transactional B2B sales cycles, it needs to evolve in an ABM context—where your focus is on influencing entire buying groups, not just individuals. 

In ABM, lead scoring gives valuable information into how engaged each contact is and helps surface buyer personas within the buying group, whether they’re potential champions or challengers that could block a buying decision. But to drive real progress with an ABM approach, you need to strategically close the consensus gap—the space between individual interest and collective alignment. If you’re only tracking one engaged lead within a target account, you’re missing broader buying dynamics, such as those multiple buyers with different pain points and priorities to address in their everyday routines. 

 Instead of looking at leads in isolation, you need to assess the combined activity across all contacts within an account. For example, Forrester client feedback finds that if three stakeholders from the same company engage with your brand, you’re 50% more likely to convert that account from opportunity to closed won. 

By combining lead scoring with account scoring, you get a fuller picture of both individual and collective buying signals.  Scoring on the individual and collective account levels also helps to quickly identify MQAs and sales qualified accounts (SQAs) more accurately, as they’re able to rank potential customers based on how likely they are to buy, their fit with the ideal customer profile (ICP), and their behaviors across channels. A strong scoring model also improves lead segmentation within your target account list. By assigning value to different characteristics and behaviors, you prioritize high-intent leads while identifying those that may need further engagement or requalification.

Step-by-Step Guide: Building Your ABM-Ready Lead & Account Scoring Model

In ABM, targeting the right accounts is just the beginning—knowing when and how to engage them is what drives real impact. By building a scoring model that blends individual activity with account-level insights, you can align with sales on what qualifies as a high-priority opportunity, accelerate pipeline, and focus your efforts where they’ll matter most. 

Use this step-by-step guide to create a scoring framework that reflects your ABM strategy and helps you engage the right people at the right time—within the right accounts. 

1. Determine Your Fit Score

Remember, scoring isn’t just about individuals within an ABM framework—it’s about how well each lead contributes to the bigger picture of account engagement. To prioritize effectively, score leads based on how their role, company characteristics, and potential value align with your ICP and target account list. Focus on assigning numerical values for attributes that signal both influence and strategic fit across the buying committee, including: 

• Job Title: Are you engaging a key decision-maker or influencer within the account? 
• Industry: Does this account match your ICP and strategic verticals? 
• Potential Deal Size/Revenue: Does this account represent a high-value opportunity worth ABM investment? 
• Region: Is the account located in a region you’re actively targeting for growth? 
• Technographics/Product Fit: Does the account’s current tech stack create a natural opportunity for your product—either as an integration, upgrade, or replacement? 

2. Determine Your Engagement Score

Engagement signals reveal when individuals within an account are showing real buying interest—not just by being present, but by actively interacting with your brand. These behaviors indicate which stakeholders are leaning in, consuming your content, and moving closer to a decision. 

Key engagement indicators to score include: 

• Content Interactions: Have they downloaded high-value assets, joined webinars, or engaged with solution-oriented content that suggests active consideration? 
• Email & Website Activity: Are they opening emails, clicking through CTAs, or exploring key webpages like product overviews, pricing, or case studies? 

3. Score the Buying Committee

To accurately assess an account’s readiness, you need to evaluate the collective engagement across key stakeholders and understand their roles in the decision-making process. 

Key steps to score an account effectively: 

• Identify Buying Roles and Buyer Personas: Map out who’s who—decision-makers, influencers, blockers—and ensure campaigns and sales outreach align with their role in the deal. 
• Measure Collective Activity: Look at engagement signals across all contacts in the account to understand overall buying intent. 
• Track Multi-Contact Engagement: Prioritize accounts where multiple people from the same company are interacting with your brand, signaling coordinated interest and internal discussions. 

4. Define Lead Scoring Weights & Thresholds

To make your ABM scoring model actionable, you need clear qualification thresholds that guide how and when to engage leads and accounts. These guidelines help ensure that marketing and sales focus their efforts on the right opportunities at the right time—maximizing reach and messaging efficiency across the buying committee. 

Key qualification criteria to establish include: 

• Minimum Score for Nurture: Define the lead scoring criteria that qualifies a contact for your nurture program, which helps to build engagement until they’re sales-ready. 
• Sales-Ready Threshold: Identify when a lead’s higher score signals readiness for direct sales outreach versus requiring more nurturing to move them along the journey. 
• Disqualification and Re-Engagement: Set criteria for when a lead or account should be disqualified, and outline a re-engagement path to revisit these contacts later if their interest or product/market fit improves.

Aligning Sales & Marketing on Lead Qualification 

A common pain point in lead nurturing is the disconnect between marketing’s lead generation efforts and sales’ expectations of what constitutes a high-quality lead. Without a shared definition of marketing qualified leads (MQLs), sales qualified leads (SQLs), MQAs, and SQAs, misalignment leads to wasted effort.  

Sixty-one percent of B2B marketers pass every lead to sales yet only 27% of those leads are qualified. Even worse, sales reps end up ignoring half of them. Gleanster Research also finds that only 25% of marketing-generated leads are sales-ready at any given time. These disqualification statistics highlight the critical need for marketing and sales to collaborate closely in defining, agreeing, and implementing lead and account scoring rules. By co-creating lead qualification criteria, both teams build mutual understanding and trust, reducing friction and ensuring leads and accounts are prioritized appropriately in marketing strategies. 

When expanding into an ABM strategy for lead nurture and lead score process, this alignment becomes even more important. Sales and marketing need to agree on what qualifies an entire account by assessing both individual buying committee members’ actions and their collective momentum across the funnel. Remember, buying committee members move through the sales funnel at different speeds. While a multi-channel nurture approach ensures messaging surrounds the buying group continuously, marketing and sales must clearly understand which behaviors and thresholds trigger progression to the next qualification stage. 

Here are the key signals to consider for both individual leads and accounts: 

MQL to SQL: When an Individual Is Ready to Engage with Sales 

Know the clear signals that indicate when a lead is ready for sales outreach, such as high-intent content engagement, lead scoring thresholds, and strong behavioral cues like frequent visits or form submissions. Proactively analyzing these signals ensures timely and effective sales engagement at the individual level that will accelerate the sales cycle. 

Key signals include: 

• Engagement with high-intent content such as pricing pages or demo requests 
• Lead scoring thresholds indicating readiness 
• Behavioral signals such as frequent return visits or form fills for multiple assets like whitepapers 

MQA to SQA: When an Entire Account Is Ready to Engage with Sales 

Multiple stakeholders must show engagement, especially the decision-makers across the account. Track collective interactions, repeated visits to key assets, and increased nurture campaign engagement to identify when the entire buying committee is ready for sales outreach and deeper engagement with content that appears in the consideration and decision-making stages of the funnel. 

Key signals include: 

• Multiple stakeholders engaging with content, indicating buying committee interest 
• Increase in decision-makers’ engagement with nurture campaign and content 
• Repeated visits to solution pages and key assets signaling strong purchase intent 

Optimize Your Scoring Model Over Time 

Lead and account scoring isn’t a “set it and forget it” exercise—it’s a living model that must evolve with your business. Alongside industry and marketplace changes, your ICP, buyer behaviors, and go-to-market strategy will most likely shift. Your scoring model needs to shift accordingly. 

To keep your model relevant, schedule regular scoring reviews—ideally quarterly—and include feedback from sales to ensure it reflects real-world selling conditions. Use insights from closed-won and closed-lost deals to identify which signals best predict success and which thresholds need adjustment. 

Scoring updates should also consider: 

• Changes to your ICP, such as new target industries or company sizes 
• Emerging buyer behavior patterns across channels 
• Industry seasonality that may affect engagement or purchase cycles 

Marketing and sales teams need to also keep a pulse on buyer behaviors, and work together to: 

• Refine and expand ICP definitions using real-world sales insights 
• Update target account lists to capture new opportunities 
• Improve lead scoring models to better prioritize high-value prospects 

When marketing and sales share a clear understanding of the target audience, marketers can ensure content and messaging reach buyers across the entire buying group. From there, they can score the entire account based on the marketing qualifications, which helps provide high-value accounts primed for sales engagement. The sales team can refer to the account’s overall qualification score and actions to best determine how to engage these accounts. Continuously referencing and refining the account’s actions leads to better scoring, personalization, and opportunities for high-value engagement and conversion rates. 

Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them 

Even the most thoughtful scoring models can fall short without the right strategy and oversight to overcome challenges. Some of the most common issues include: 

• Over-scoring surface-level behaviors like social media interactions, email open metrics, website visits, or webinar sign-ups that don’t indicate real buying intent 
• Sales skepticism due to unclear criteria or past misalignment with lead quality 
• Incomplete or inaccurate data, often stemming from poor customer relationship management (CRM) hygiene 
• Limited visibility across buying groups, making it hard to assess true account readiness 

To overcome these challenges: 

• Build shared dashboards that make scoring logic and lead/account status transparent to both marketing and sales 
• Assign unified RevOps ownership for maintaining and governing the scoring model; consider using automation tools and predictive lead scoring capability natively or through a partner integration 
• Enrich your customer data with intent signals and technographic insights to move beyond surface behaviors and focus on high-fit, high-interest opportunities 

A well-maintained, collaborative scoring model not only boosts alignment—it increases your ability to target, engage, and convert accounts with precision. 

Scoring Isn’t About More Leads—It’s About Better Accounts 

Quality always outweighs quantity—and your success with ABM depends on focusing on accounts that demonstrate real buying intent through the combined engagement of multiple stakeholders. Account momentum is the clearest measure of sales readiness, as you can analyze collective interest and activity across the buying committee versus individual lead scores that only show one person’s interests and needs versus the entire account’s priorities.  

Madison Logic offers a robust ABM solution package to help you capitalize on account momentum:  

• ML Insights helps analyze engagement and intent signals to score accounts and buying groups, allowing you to prioritize high-value opportunities effectively.  
• With seamless CRM and MAP integrations with platforms from Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and Oracle Eloqua, the Madison Logic Platform streamlines campaign execution and aligns marketing and sales efforts for targeted, personalized nurture programs that respond to real-time buyer behavior. 
• By tracking engagement across multiple channels and refining target personas with behavior insights, ML Measurement empowers your teams to build precise, impactful messaging that resonates with buying groups.  

If you’re relying on surface-level engagement or lead volume for volume’s sake, you’re missing the bigger picture. Strong nurturing starts with strong lead and account scoring—so you can focus your efforts on the buyers that matter most.