7 Best Lead Scoring Software For 2023 (+ A Secret Weapon)

Searching for the best lead scoring software?

That’s right, we’ve got your back.

We to introduce you to seven stellar lead scoring software solutions, each with their own strengths. We’ll compare their features and pricing and provide some tips on making your decision.

Here’s a tip now: If you want a competitive edge without all the manual work, look no further than this groundbreaking tool.

Without further ado, let’s get started!

Seven Excellent Lead Scoring Software Solutions

Okay, a little ado 🤭. Before we start, let’s nail down exactly what lead scoring is.

Lead scoring is the process of assigning points to prospects based on:

• Their demographic or firmographic similarity to your ideal customer persona.
• The number and nature of interactions they’ve had with your website, email campaigns, marketing campaigns, social media content, and your product.

Traditionally, companies use lead scoring to identify when a marketing qualified lead (MQL  — someone who’s engaged with your marketing content) becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL — someone who’s ready to talk to a sales rep and possibly make a purchase).

But manual lead scoring is a challenging and time-consuming process consisting of:

• Figuring out what criteria to use
• Crunching the numbers
• Completing the lead management process by handing each qualified lead to a sales rep
• Continually updating the system

That’s where lead scoring software comes into play. 

They help you identify the most promising prospects in your sales funnel so your sales team can target them with the right strategies and get them to convert!

To make your search easier, we’ve categorized the different types of lead scoring tools as follows:

• Predictive lead scoring: The tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create and update the lead qualification system automatically

• With product usage data (Spoiler alert: this is the one for you 💕)
• Without product usage data

• Traditional lead scoring: You set up the rules and the tool applies them

• With product usage data
• Without product usage data

Pro tip: Predictive lead scoring offers many benefits over the traditional method. Predictive scoring tools work out of the box without you having to set up the criteria first. And they update themselves automatically to stay current. This saves you time and ensures the best results!

With that said, here are seven brilliant options in the lead scoring software market:

Category 1: Predictive Lead Scoring With Product Usage Data

Let’s begin with the best — at least, the best for companies that want to excel in product-led growth (PLG).

This type of lead scoring software provides the best of both worlds: letting AI do the work of making and managing the system, and incorporating data that tells you how your customers are using your product.

When customers use your free trial, free version, and paid product, they send you many signals about their fit for purchasing, upselling, and cross-selling. Without product-usage data, you could miss all of this valuable information.

1. Toplyne 🏆

Are you ready for this?

Toplyne is a headless sales AI for identifying and pursuing product-qualified leads (PQLs). Within tracking set up by product-led growth (PLG) companies, it looks for signals in customer product-usage data that indicate conversion opportunities. 

This way, it can help you discover parts of your product qualified lead pipeline you never knew existed!

Looking beyond lead qualification, Toplyne helps you implement targeted sales-assist strategies that actually work.

The results?

Toplyne can improve your conversion rate, aid in customer retention (reduce churn), and encourage expansions — all contributing directly to your bottom line 💸.

Guess someone’s going to top the NRR charts this quarter. 😏

Key Features:

Here are some of Toplyne’s fantastic features:

A. Helps You Identify Promising Leads

Toplyne lets you create monetization playbooks to identify the best-of-the-best conversion and expansion opportunities. Looking at your customers’ product-usage data helps build a pipeline of high-quality product-qualified leads.

Here’s how:

First, choose between targeting individual users or accounts (organizations). Toplyne then segments your user base into four categories based on their engagement and likeliness of purchasing, namely:

• 👥 All users
• ❄️ Cold users
• ☕ Warm users
• 🔥 Hot users

This is a great way to see who’s a hot lead (prospect for account expansion) and who needs extra attention to prevent churn.

You can further customize your target group for different actions by filtering, segmenting, and establishing control groups.

Toplyne then syncs this precise customer data from your monetization playbooks with your GTM apps for targeted outreach. It also provides a top-notch analysis of the results.

The app integrates seamlessly with GTM tools like Hubspot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive to execute your strategies.

B. Boosts your Stats

At the end of the day, it’s all about growth metrics like your win rate and net revenue retention (NRR).

Toplyne lets you experiment with sales strategies rapidly and at scale while also providing valuable analytics to reveal what’s working and what isn’t.

It’s not just about freemium conversions, either. Toplyne helps make the most of your whole user base. After all, the longer you retain a customer, the more the initial sale is worth over time.

So, you can implement strategies like:

• Sales assists for the potential customer who needs help taking the leap.
• In-app nudges that help new users reach the activation point (the point of realizing the value of your product).
• Well-timed CTAs to encourage upsells and cross-sells.
• Requesting feedback from power users to gather positive reviews.

You, too, can see incredible results with Toplyne.

Take it from:

📈 Gather: 35% more pipeline coverage by identifying PQLs and running GTM experiments (with Hubspot CRM).

📈 Pictory: Halved churn and doubled reactivation with playbook experiments (with Zoho CRM).

📈 InVideo: 80+% increase in sales from sales assist and PQL experiments (with Salesforce).

C. Integrates with Your Analytics and GTM Tools

Toplyne sits between your existing product analytics apps and GTM systems.

It uses product usage data from apps like:

• Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap for product usage and behavioral data
• Stripe, Adyen for billing information
• Clearbit, Slintel, Zoominfo for business intelligence data

The app pulls this data together to create meaningful customer segments. Then it connects with your GTM tools to orchestrate strategies that boost conversions, engagement, upsells, and more.

The best part is: it incorporates right into your existing stack, meaning no change management or extra UIs for your team!

Pricing

• Freemium plan and free trial are available
• Paid plans start at $179/month

Category 2: Predictive Lead Scoring Without Product Usage Data

Below are three lead scoring tools that use AI to score leads based on their engagement with a company’s marketing resources and website — pre-product-usage.

Incorporating AI into lead scoring in this way can be great for marketing-led and sales-led growth (MLG and SLG). But keep in mind: shooting for PLG without utilizing product usage data is a bit like leaving the apples out of an apple pie 🤨.

2. Salesforce Einstein

Salesforce Einstein is a predictive lead scoring software add-on for Salesforce Pardot. It uses machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to spot conversion trends and score lead quality.

You can use this lead scoring tool with other Salesforce Marketing Cloud solutions for effective lead management and marketing automation.

Now, let’s check out its delightful features.

Key Features

• Utilize AI to score inbound leads according to how much they have in common with previously converted leads.
• Get updates to your predictive lead scoring model every 10 days.
• Use Einstein's global scoring model (which uses lead data from other Salesforce customers) if you don't have enough lead data to inform your own system.
• See which of the criteria had the greatest impact on the lead score.

Pricing

• No free trial or version
• Available as a $50/user per month add-on for Salesforce Sales Cloud  
• Comes with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement in the Advanced plan ($4,000/month billed annually)

3. Hubspot Marketing Hub

Hubspot Marketing Hub can manage your blog and social media profiles, advertisements, email marketing, and more. It also offers lead scoring. 

What’s more, you can easily integrate the lead management software with Hubspot CRM. The main downside is the price tag, which doesn’t exactly make it a ‘hub’ for smaller businesses.

Key Features

• See a complete timeline of customer context collated in one place.
• Choose between manual scoring or predictive scoring powered by AI.
• Tailor marketing content based on lead scores.
• Set up multiple lead scoring models for different audiences and personas.

Pricing

• Free plan is available but doesn’t include lead scoring
• Paid plans (incl. lead scoring) start at $3,600/month

4. Freshsales

Freshsales is a popular customer relationship management (CRM), lead generation, and predictive lead scoring software.

Ever wanted your own AI assistant?

Freshsales’ AI, Freddy, can help you score your inbound leads, provide predictive analytics, and execute automated actions.

‍

Key Features

• Automatically update lead scores after every interaction.
• See which leads you should prioritize based on your buyer persona.
• Use negative scoring when a potential customer doesn’t match your scoring criteria.
• Receive insight into factors that contributed to the score.

Pricing

• Free plan available but excludes lead scoring
• 21-day free trial available
• Paid plans start at $18/user per month

Category 3: Traditional Lead Scoring With Product Usage Data

Next, we’ll look at a tool that combines traditional lead scoring with some in-product data.

Sounds like a good middle ground for PLG companies, right?

Think again 👀.

While it’s great to incorporate product usage data, manually setting up and maintaining the framework could lead to human error, inaccurate results, and a whole lot of extra work.

5. Ortto

Ortto focuses on journey building, which entails setting up actions triggered by user behavior. It utilizes traditional lead scoring, where you determine the criteria for both fit and engagement.

You can use Ortto’s data, analytics, and journey builder to automate lead nurturing techniques, such as email and SMS marketing, pop-ups, forms, and surveys.

Key Features

• Measure ROI (return on investment) based on which channels produce the best lead quality.
• See where leads are commonly dropping off and take preventative action.
• View results from all your marketing channels on one dashboard.
• Access data like the number of conversions, average touchpoints required, and time to convert.

Pricing

• 14-day free trial available
• Paid plans start at $29/month for up to 2,000 contacts

Category 4: Traditional Lead Scoring Without Product Usage Data

Below are two traditional tools that apply the lead scoring criteria you select for MLG and SLG.

But what if you don’t want to limit yourself to just sales qualified and marketing qualified lead scoring?

We get it. If you’ve got a product that speaks for itself and you want to lean into PLG, then excluding the most crucial data set (product usage data) is probably not the way to do it. 😬

Additionally, without AI, everything must be set up manually. This can take a lot of time and effort and doesn’t guarantee results.

6. Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is a customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation software with lead scoring features.

It enables you to set up email and social media marketing campaigns, and create your own lead scoring model.

If you already use Zoho CRM for your sales team or marketing team, it can’t hurt to check out the scoring tool. If not, heads up — it might have a steep learning curve and doesn’t utilize predictive analytics yet.

Key Features

• Track and score behaviors across multiple channels, such as email campaigns, social media, and surveys.
• Allocate negative scoring for relevant actions.
• Configure a different lead scoring model for multiple requirements.
• Set up marketing automation actions, such as lead qualification alerts and prospect labeling.

Pricing

• 15-day free trial available
• Paid plans start at $18/user per month

7. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is, first and foremost, an email marketing tool. It also has some CRM, lead generation, and lead scoring features.

This makes ActiveCampaign a decent lead scoring tool for companies that:

• Have a marketing-led growth (MLG) model.
• Want to use lead scoring to improve their email campaigns.

This way, your customers won’t feel like:

Key Features

• Choose the actions — E.g., from website interaction and email activity — which you'd like to incorporate into your lead scores.
• Trigger alerts for lead score changes and each new hot lead.
• Score individual leads or overall "deals" (accounts).
• Set up multiple lead scoring models for different products and services.

Pricing

• 14-day free trial available
• Paid plans (including lead scoring) start at $70/month for up to 500 contacts

Now that we’ve explored some of the tools you can use for lead scoring, here’s some advice to help you make your decision.

What to Look for in Lead Scoring Software

If you’re unsure how to choose the best lead scoring software, here are five of the most crucial features a lead scoring tool should have:

• Ability to adapt to company goals and benchmarks.
• Offers integrations with analytics solutions.
• Allows you to import, export, or share data and reports.
• Provide adequate support for onboarding and use.
• Offers up-to-date automations and features such as predictive scoring powered by machine learning.

Start Your Journey to Wins Galore With Toplyne

Lead scoring can be a great way to optimize your sales process and the efforts of your marketing team. If you’re on the hunt for the perfect lead scoring tool, you can use this list to guide you toward the right choice for your SaaS company.

But maybe it’s time to implement a tool — like number one on our list — that’s on the cutting edge of product-led growth 🗡️.