Lead Scoring Rules Overview

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Act-On's Lead Scoring Rules feature is where you turn your marketing funnel into math. There are three families of rule you can combine in a single score sheet: profile rules (who the contact is), behaviour rules (what they've done in Act-On), and custom rules (what they've done outside Act-On). This page is a reference to each type.

Who does this: Marketing ops builds and maintains the rules. Sales leadership agrees on what should count
Time needed: 10 to 15 minutes to skim this reference; see Setting Up a Lead Scoring System for the step-by-step build
Why this matters: Each rule family answers a different question. Profile rules answer "does this contact fit?" Behaviour rules answer "is this contact showing interest?" Custom rules answer "did they engage outside our marketing stack?" Using all three gives you a more honest read than any one alone.
In plain English: Think of a score as answering two questions: is this the right person (profile) and are they leaning in (behaviour)? Custom touch points extend behaviour scoring to things you track outside Act-On, like trade-show attendance.
New to scoring? Start with Setting Up a Lead Scoring System - that's the end-to-end setup guide. This page is the reference for the rule types themselves.

Profile rules

Profile rules add points based on field values on the contact record - industry, job title, company size, region, and so on. They work much like list segments.

When you add a profile condition, you specify:

  • Contact Field - the field to evaluate
  • Condition - the logic used to check the field (equals, contains, is greater than, etc.)
  • Criteria - the value or values the rule is looking for

Behaviour rules

Behaviour rules add points when a contact does something Act-On is already tracking - opens, clicks, form submits, media downloads, page visits, and so on. Assign point values based on how significant each action is in your own sales process.

There are three flavours of behaviour rule:

Default behaviour rules

The standard activities Act-On tracks. They appear at the top of the Activity scoring section. A contact earns the points every time they complete the action (opens three messages - three times the points).

Custom Touch Point rules

When you upload external marketing activities via the Custom Touch Points feature, each custom action becomes scorable. Use this for behaviours Act-On can't observe directly - trade-show conversations, offline events, sales-tool engagements, third-party downloads.

Asset-specific rules

Click the plus icon below your scoring rules to add a rule tied to one or more specific assets (a particular form, message, landing page, webinar). A contact earns the points the first time per asset - repeat opens of the same message or resubmissions of the same form don't stack.

Default vs asset-specific: Default behaviour rules count every event. Asset-specific rules count once per asset. Pick the one that matches how you want to weight repeat engagement.

Multiple Score Sheets

Multiple Score Sheets let you create up to 4 additional scoring sheets alongside your default. Use them to score for different teams, regions, product lines, or to separate customer scoring from prospect scoring. The setup steps on a secondary sheet are the same as the default.

To create a new sheet, click the plus icon at the top of the Scoring Rules page. To sync secondary lead scores into your Act-On lists or CRM, you'll need to build a segment of contacts whose secondary score is in the range you want, then use a list maintenance program to copy that score into a list field.

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