For years, marketers and sales teams have struggled with vague, one-dimensional scoring that fails to distinguish between truly qualified prospects and casual browsers. HubSpot's new lead scoring system, released in February 2025, finally brought clarity to this critical process.

 

Traditional lead scoring has always suffered from a fundamental flaw: it combines everything into a single number. When a prospect visits your pricing page (good!) but works for a company too small to afford your enterprise solution (bad!), the resulting score becomes a confusing mishmash that leaves sales teams guessing.

The old system forced you to treat all engagement equally, regardless of intent. Opening three emails counted the same whether the person was a decision-maker at your ideal customer or just someone who enjoys your newsletter. This led to wasted time, missed opportunities, and that awkward silence in sales-marketing meetings when someone asks, "So... are these leads actually any good?"

The New Scoring System: Bringing the Sauce

HubSpot's new lead scoring tool, which fully replaces the legacy system on August 31, 2025, fundamentally reimagines how we evaluate prospects. Instead of a single, muddled score, you now get separate, focused scores that actually make sense.

Separate Scores for Different Dimensions

The new system lets you create individual scores for:

  • Fit: How well a prospect matches your ideal customer profile based on company size, job title, industry, revenue, and other demographic factors
  • Engagement: How interested they seem based on website visits, email opens, form fills, and other behavioural signals

If you're on Marketing Hub Enterprise, you'll also get a combined score that blends both dimensions, giving you that coveted bird's-eye view of who's both qualified and interested.

As HubSpot's official announcement explains, "Marketing Professional and Enterprise customers can now create scores using the Lead Scoring tool, which features more advanced logic and actionable insights."

Scoring That Actually Reflects Reality

The beauty of the new system lies in its flexibility and specificity. Want to boost a lead's score if they opened three emails in the last week? Easy. Need to deduct points if someone unsubscribed, bounced, or hasn't been active in 60 days? Done.

You're no longer forced to treat all engagement equally. Instead, you get to prioritise what really matters to your funnel, the actions and attributes that genuinely predict buying intent.

AI-Assisted Scoring

Behind the scenes, HubSpot's model can now recommend attributes and behaviours most predictive of conversion, based on your actual data. Rather than spending hours brainstorming what should "count" as a hot lead, you can lean on real patterns and insights.

This doesn't mean surrendering control, you can still tweak and customise scores to suit your business needs. But if you've ever wished for algorithmic validation of your gut instincts (and who hasn't?), this is it.

Why This Is Great

Lead scoring isn't just about giving marketing something to show sales, it's about ensuring no great prospect slips through the cracks. With this new setup, you're not just looking at who a lead is, but what they're doing.

You can design scores that truly reflect buying signals, and build workflows, list segments, or internal alerts based on them. That means:

  • More qualified conversations
  • Less time wasted on tire-kickers
  • Better alignment between your teams
  • Clearer prioritisation of sales efforts
  • More accurate forecasting

Important Dates to Remember

If you're currently using HubSpot's legacy scoring, mark these dates on your calendar:

  • July 1, 2025: You can no longer edit existing score properties
  • August 31, 2025: Existing score properties will stop updating completely

As HubSpot's knowledge base warns, "Starting on August 31, 2025, existing score properties will stop updating." Migration is not automatic, you'll need to recreate your scoring logic in the new system.

Final Word: Score More, Stress Less

HubSpot's new lead scoring tool is a smarter way to spot the leads that matter most. It's clearer, more powerful, and totally tailored to how real people engage with your brand.

Don't wait until the last minute to make this crucial transition. The sooner you migrate, the more time you'll have to optimise your new scoring models before the old system stops updating on August 31st.

Need help setting up your new lead scoring system? Check out HubSpot's comprehensive guide or watch their migration demo for step-by-step instructions. Need WAY more help than you thought? Reach out for a chat today.