7 Best Lead Scoring Software to Enhance Sales Efficiency in 2024

The faster you qualify leads, the faster you can respond to them. The faster you score them, the faster you’ll qualify them. This means that lead scoring software is a critical link in any sales or RevOps tech stack.

But not all lead scoring software is created equal. Some have features that are more effective at accelerating speed-to-lead. For example, Default’s proprietary study of over 88K+ inbound leads showed that using AI in lead scoring models and qualification alone can accelerate speed-to-lead by 31%.

Rather than spend hours sifting through product guides and G2 reviews and subreddits to figure out which you should buy, we’ve compiled this comparison guide for you. Read on to figure out the best lead scoring software for your sales and marketing teams' needs. 

Best lead scoring software options at a glance

1. Default: Best lead scoring software overall
2. HubSpot: Best lead scoring software with built-in CRM
3. Apollo.io: Top lead scoring data source
4. Clearbit: Top lead scoring data source
5. Salesforce Sales Cloud: Best lead scoring software for enterprise
6. 6Sense: Best lead scoring software for buying intent
7. Toplyne: Best lead scoring software for B2C

1. Default: Best lead scoring software overall

We consider Default to be the best lead scoring software for many reasons. Top of the list is that Default is an all-in-one RevOps platform. It’s the only solution that automatically captures, scores, qualifies, routes, schedules, and nurtures leads in one place. All other options on this list require a deep bench of integrations to achieve those results. 

Features

• Automated lead scoring and qualification with real-time enrichment data and AI-powered summaries
• Leverage enrichment data, captured data from forms, CRM data, and behavioral data from your product-led growth (PLG) funnels to enhance your scoring criteria
• Qualify leads and automatically route to the correct internal contact
• Schedule meetings with qualified leads directly upon conversion
• Build advanced, flexible sales & marketing automation workflows through a no-code, user-friendly interface
• Seamless integration with dozens of sales and marketing software to enhance Default’s built-in functionality

Limitations

Default is not a point solution. It’s designed to replace your existing inbound and RevOps lead flows. The benefit of this approach, of course, is that all your data and automations are in one central location. This reduces the likelihood of broken flows, data loss, and revenue leakage. 

Additionally, Default is not built for engineers. It’s built for sales and marketing teams. While Default allows a great deal of flexibility and customization, all of this is handled through a no-code, drag-and-drop interface. 

Pricing

Default offers three pricing tiers:

• Inbound. Get started with 250 enriched leads per month, five seats, and unlimited meetings, forms, and routing.
• Studio. Start scaling up with 500 enriched leads per month, 5 seats, and unlimited meetings, forms, and routing. 
• Scale. For large inbound and outbound traffic, with up to 2000 enriched leads per month, 10 seats, and unlimited meetings, forms, and routing. 

2. HubSpot: Best lead scoring software with built-in CRM

Image source: HubSpot

HubSpot Sales & Marketing Hubs include lead scoring features built into the CRM, as well as native sales and marketing automations. This combination makes HubSpot a popular option among marketing and revenue leaders. 

This lead scoring software that comes with HubSpot Marketing Hub has earned a place on our list not only because of its popularity and market share, but also its built-in CRM. 

Features

• Both traditional (demo-based) and AI-powered predictive lead scoring models that can be used separately or in tandem. 
• Native lead qualification that integrates directly with the CRM
• Built-in marketing automation platform to route leads based on round-robin and rules-based assignment 
• Built-in lead enrichment (Clearbit is owned by HubSpot)
• Customized dashboards for high-level and granular reporting, as well as marketing campaign-based, actionable insights
• Dedicated customer support team members for enterprise customers

Limitations

As a lead scoring software, HubSpot has two main limitations. First, the platform’s lead scoring capabilities are limited to data within the application itself. Second, HubSpot’s automations for post-qualification activities are rigid and difficult to customize. Finally, as we’ll see below, HubSpot’s lead scoring functionality is only available at the higher (pricier) tiers. 

Pricing

HubSpot’s full lead scoring capabilities, along with other advanced features, are only available with both Marketing and Sales Hub Enterprise activated. The Marketing Hub starts at $3,600 per month, and the Sales Hub at $150 per user per month. However, you may be able to get a bundling discount. 

See our full Default vs. HubSpot comparison here. 

3. Apollo.io: Top lead scoring data source

Image source: Coda

If you have more data at your disposal, you can score leads faster and more accurately. It’s critical to choose lead scoring software with sufficient depth and breadth of data. Apollo.io is one of two top lead scoring data sources that we’re recommending in this article. 

Default uses Apollo.io’s extensive contact and company database to power our lead enrichment software. 

Features

• Over 200M+ contacts in the database covering a wide range of demographics
• Automated inbound lead enrichment
• Advanced search filters that include behavioral and buyer intent signals
• Multi-channel marketing automation platform (email, phone, chat) to cover the entire sales process
• Integrations with CRMs and other sales and marketing software
• Analytics and reporting functionality to surface actionable insights across the entire sales pipeline

Limitations

Apollo.io’s biggest limitation is their customer support team, which many users claim is slow to respond. Additionally, Apollo.io’s automation tools have some bugs, particularly in the reporting functionality. Some users also experience email deliverability issues, but these are rare.

Pricing

Apollo.io’s pricing system is credit-based. You can purchase credits in four tiers. The first (free) tier is limited, but offers 10,000 free contacts. The Basic tier ($49 per user per month) offers starter functionality. The Professional tier ($79 per user per month) offers some more advanced functionality and limited AI capabilities. The Organization tier ($149 per user per month) offers a range of advanced features & functionality, including AI message generation. 

See our full Default vs. Apollo.io comparison here. 

4. Clearbit: Top lead scoring data source

Image source: Clearbit

The second lead scoring data source we’re recommending in this article is Clearbit. With built-in AI change detection and powerful APIs and webhooks, Clearbit makes it easy to enrich leads with up-to-date information. 

Default uses Clearbit’s AI-powered database to power our lead enrichment software.

Features

• Contact database includes 100+ attributes per contact—millions of data points altogether
• AI-powered change detection enables automated updates to records, which keeps all contact data up to date
• Powerful APIs and webhooks make integration it easy to integrate with other sales technology (including Default)
• User-friendly interface that's straightforward and easy to navigate

Limitations

Clearbit is a contact enrichment point solution. While it provides excellent contact data, it offers little else. If you go with Clearbit, you’ll need another lead scoring solution to act on the data you receive. 

Pricing

Clearbit does not provide publicly available pricing data. Reviews from customers indicate that Clearbit prices are based on database size, not usage. Additionally, some users describe the pricing as too steep for startups and early-stage companies. 

5. Salesforce Sales Cloud: Best lead scoring software for enterprises

Image source: Software Advice

For enterprises who manage thousands (or tens of thousands) of leads per month and need detailed, advanced lead scoring capabilities, Salesforce Sales Hub is a great option. With access to data from Slack, Tableau, Einstein 1, and their own Marketing, Sales, & AI capabilities, Salesforce Sales Cloud features a deep bench of data to improve lead scoring accuracy. 

Features

• Einstein Lead Scoring that leverages AI to score leads based on business patterns of lead conversion
• Advanced activity tracking that captures emails, events, and engagements directly in the CRM across the entire customer journey
• Omnichannel lead tracking and monitoring, capturing behavioral data from all channels
• Opportunity & account management to surface deal-specific insights and adjust lead scoring for current opportunities
• Analytics and reporting features to surface valuable insights to help fine-tune and adjust lead scoring activities

Limitations

Salesforce Sales Cloud’s biggest limitations are primarily due to the platform’s size and expansiveness. The user interface can be unwieldy for new users. The functionality is complex and requires platform training for most users to take advantage of it. Plus, the pricing model for advanced features (including lead scoring) is out of range for most early-stage companies or startups. 

Pricing

Salesforce Sales Cloud Einstein is available with Salesforce’s Enterprise ($165 per user per month), Performance ($330 per user per month), and Unlimited ($500 per user per month) editions. 

6. 6Sense: Best lead scoring software for buying intent

Image source: Business Wire

Lead scoring software that only targets inbound flows can cause you to miss out on a pretty big segment of the market. Because, let’s face it, most active buyers in your category won’t make it to your website. So how do you find and target them?

Enter 6sense. This platform leverages AI/ML, predictive analytics, and access to vast amounts of data to surface active buyers in real time. With 6sense’s insights, you can score and target leads with hyper-personalized outbound messages and bring them into your existing funnels. 

Features

• Extensive company and contact database that integrates directly with CRMs and ERPs
• AI-powered predictive analytics engine that surfaces active buyers at the moment of engagement
• User dashboards to visualize, prioritize, and surface valuable insights on top leads
• Built-in automated sales and marketing tools to turn insights into action 

Limitations

6sense is an enterprise-level solution, in every sense of the word. For companies looking to generate their first 1,000 customers, likely the breadth and depth of insight will be overwhelming. Plus, 6sense is priced for enterprise, making the solution inaccessible to early-stage companies. 

Pricing

Although 6sense technically offers a free starter account, none of its useful features are included. Unfortunately, 6sense offers no specific pricing information on their website, although we’ve heard from users that it’s on the pricier end of things. 

7. Topline: Best lead scoring software for B2C

Image source: Toplyne

Much like 6sense, Toplyne focuses on retrieving what they call the “dark funnel”: people who see your ad, have high intent, but don’t convert. While 6sense is geared toward the B2B use case, Toplyne is a B2C solution. 

Features

• AI-powered analysis of your website visitors via tracking pixel
• Generation of value-based audiences to help Meta and Google reach ICPs

Limitations

Toplyne’s basic limitation is that it’s a point solution, focusing exclusively on generating audiences for ad campaigns. It also seems to focus on ads run through Meta (Facebook & Instagram) and Google. If you're looking for a B2C marketing tool that handles this specific use case, however, Toplyne can be a good choice.

Pricing

Toplyne has a unique pricing model, where users pay based on the percentage of ad spend they use on campaigns through Toplyne. There are two rates you can pay—Standard and Enterprise—but unfortunately the specifics aren’t available on Toplyne’s website. 

What are the benefits of lead scoring? 

Lead scoring—especially AI-powered, automated lead scoring—is a critical component of any automated inbound flow. It helps you to determine buyer intent, fit, and likelihood to close. Without automated lead scoring, you’re forced to qualify leads manually.

You may be able to handle that approach with your first 10 inbound customers. But as you scale up your inbound flows and increase your volume of leads, you’ll need a system that is more robust and objective. When you adopt an automated lead scoring system integrated with sales scheduling and lead routing software, you’ll start to realize the following benefits.

Accelerate speed-to-lead

The faster your sales reps can respond to a hot lead, the more likely that lead will book a demo (and, by extension, close). When reps aren’t spending precious minutes (and yes, it is a matter of minutes) researching & collecting data on an inbound lead to determine whether it’s qualified, they can respond faster and book more meetings. 

Increase qualified demo bookings

Everyone knows what it’s like to be on a demo call and realize the lead isn’t a good fit. Rather than waste that half-hour calendar block on unqualified leads, lead scoring can help ensure demos booked through your sales scheduling software are exclusively with the most promising leads. 

More effective sales teams

Automatically scoring leads can also save your reps' time and improve your sales efficiency. By reducing the number of poor-fit leads sales teams engage with, you can increase conversion rates and reduce time spent on wasted opportunities. Plus, if sales reps aren’t neck-deep in manual, tedious research & lead qualification tasks, they can spend more time on revenue-generating activities. 

Increase Closed-Won rates

Ultimately, both of the previously mentioned benefits matter because they drive the ultimate metric for any fast-growing business: more revenue. If you can identify whether a lead is a good fit early in the sales cycle, your reps can devote more time and attention to leads that are more likely to close. This increases Closed - Won rates and helps your whole organization meet quota faster. 

Improved marketing-sales alignment

Lead scoring provides an objective way to measure whether a lead is qualified, which can improve collaboration between marketing and sales. If marketing and sales teams can agree on your lead scoring standards in advance—and even work them into your SLAs—you can avoid confusion and friction during marketing to sales handoff.

How to choose the best lead scoring tools

Based on our analysis of those seven lead scoring software, we’ve put together a list of what exactly you should look for when building your RevOps software stack. 

AI features

All of the platforms listed above have one thing in common: they use AI-powered capabilities in their lead scoring. Based on our survey of all the lead scoring software out there, AI is no longer the future—it’s table stakes. 

AI features can generally be sorted into three categories:

• Aggregation → Take hundreds of data points and provide summaries of leads and score their likelihood to close
• Prediction → Look at existing customers and predict whether a new contact is high- or low-value based on that data
• Generation → Use those predictive insights to go out and find new leads that are highly likely to be active buyers

Ease of use

Diverting developer resources away from shipping and updating products is costly. You should choose a solution that your non-technical marketing team can build and set up quickly and easily. This will ensure maximum adoption value from your revenue operations software and help to improve your sales efficiency.

Flexibility & customization

Customer journeys aren’t linear. The path customers take to making a purchase can include double-backs, omnichannel touchpoints, and leaving and re-entering the funnel multiple times. This is one reason why AI is such an important component of lead scoring. It enables more dynamic predictive models that aren’t restricted to assumptions of rigidity. 

Integration with inbound flows

Scoring inbound leads is one thing. But knowing whether a lead is a good fit is only half the battle. Turning qualified leads into new business requires action as quickly as possible. Only when your lead scoring software is integrated with your sales and marketing automations will you actually see new business. 

Pricing

While reviewing these lead scoring software, we also found pricing to be a major factor. Most platforms offering valuable AI features only do so for their enterprise-level pricing tiers. Default, on the other hand, starts offering AI-powered enrichment & qualification for our entry-level users. 

How to automate lead scoring

Broadly speaking, there are three ways to automate inbound sales through lead scoring. These approaches range from simplest to most complex (although, there’s a growing cadre of software that are making AI-powered lead scoring accessible to non-technical users). 

Demographics-based lead scoring

The first lead scoring category is demographics-based. Your lead scoring software will assign a score based on the value of each demographic within your CRM. 

Obviously, the more data you have on that lead, the more nuanced and accurate this lead scoring model will be. You won’t get this from form fields, which is why enrichment is key for this model to work for your inbound GTM engine. 

Demographics- & rules-based lead scoring

This approach goes a step further than demographics-based scoring. In addition to weighting different demographic values, this approach scores leads based on their engagement & behavioral activity. 

For example, if a lead fills out a demo form, but doesn’t immediately schedule a meeting, they’re scored lower than one that follows through. This approach takes into account not only the lead’s ICP alignment, but also their engagement and enthusiasm level. 

AI-powered lead scoring

The most advanced form of lead scoring involves training an AI model on all the data you have on Closed - Won customers. This model can then predict with high accuracy whether a new inbound lead is qualified or not, which helps your sales workflow software run more smoothly. 

AI models rise and fall based on the quality and volume of data available to them. For this approach to work, you will need hundreds of data points per contact record to help the model predict more accurately. This is another reason why enrichment is key to effective lead qualification. 

Best lead scoring tools FAQ

Can you use AI for lead scoring?

Yes, you can use AI for lead scoring. In fact, Default’s proprietary study of over 88K+ leads and 19K+ qualified demos shows that using AI in lead scoring can accelerate speed-to-lead by 31%

What is Einstein lead scoring?

Einstein lead scoring is a feature in Salesforce’s Sales Cloud Einstein. It is an AI-powered lead scoring tool that qualifies leads based on how well they fit your company’s successful conversion patterns. Sales Cloud Einstein is available as an add-on to Salesforce Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited pricing plans. 

What KPIs should you use when lead scoring?

Marketers use lead models to measure a range of KPIs. These include: 

• Average Lead Score
• Average Lead Score for Closed - Won
• Conversion Rates by Average Lead Score
• Closed - Won Rates by Average Lead Score

What makes a good lead scoring model?

Good lead scoring models are measured by their ability to accurately predict whether a lead will convert into a potential customer. To do this, you need a high-quality AI model, clean & accurate data with which to train the model, and clear benchmarks and KPIs to indicate when the model scores leads accurately (or inaccurately). 

Final thoughts on lead scoring software

After reading this article, it should be clear that only one platform on this list meets the qualifications listed above: that’s Default. So if you’re looking for the best lead scoring software—especially if you’re an early-stage or growing company—Default is the best option for modern sales leaders.

Learn more about our unified inbound automation platform with a live Default demo.

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