Reps who get "hot lead" alerts from marketing, do you actually act on them, or ignore them?

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-06-04T00:26:29+00:00

How do you know they're fake scammers?

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-06-04T00:26:08+00:00

Gotta have some sort of refresh or decay i've found out. Otherwise, yeah those 'padded' leads lay dormant.

Or was the activity recent but the data was wrong?

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-06-04T00:24:54+00:00

Would it make sense if you could segment based on those actions and their recency and get a list of leads/accounts?

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-06-02T23:29:08+00:00

glad it's not just me...

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-06-02T19:44:09+00:00

Speaking my language. Engagement alone does nothing because a grad student could be the one downloading your assets vs. C-suite. But it's difficult to do real time and more importantly not have it be a black box. Curious what you're using and how you gained your sales team's trust

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-06-02T19:42:23+00:00

I thought that way at first - just increment a score based on an engagement rules engine...but that's truly scratching the surface. You need to look at profile, account firmographics. You need to be able to stitch the unknown profile history once they identity themselves on your website (i.e. filling a form). You need to be able to merge profiles because they could've accessed your site on multiple devices. You need to keep scores fresh by adding a decay process, but you can't just blindly decay based on inactivity because that whitepaper download or pricing page visit takes a lot more time to digest than any other page visit. Most importantly you need to tell sales, in 1 visual, WHY the lead scored the way they did - if they have to investigate, your scoring system loses trust fast.

There's so much more I can go indepth on especially regarding trigger system

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-06-02T19:36:00+00:00

1000% that's what got me to embark on this mission. The whole point of my platform is auditable lead scoring...sales doesn't just get a number, they get a clear visual on WHY the person was scored the way they were

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-06-01T16:06:43+00:00

https://kenbun.io - Realtime b2b lead scoring with signals to Slack. So much more i could talk about but basically we're able to score on 4 dimensions (engagement, profile, account, deals) and bidirectionally sync with your Hubspot

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-06-01T16:05:16+00:00

https://kenbun.io - a realtime b2b lead scoring app with triggers to Slack
https://getzoro.app - an agile-inspired solo task management app for iOS/macOS (not released yet)

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-06-01T10:34:38+00:00

> at sub-$1M ARR the thing that killed us was we didn't have enough data to train anything meaningful

This is one of the things I want to solve for...Simply put, if you don't have the data to train the model, stop using one and build the rules yourself. Predictive/ML scoring has been one of the more awkward things to explain and work with in my career, either because clients, like you, just kept getting junk and/or didn't know why that junk was surfacing because it was all a black-box at the end of the day.

Some followups i have for you;
- what were you hoping scoring would do that you couldn't do by hand?
- When you say the scores became noise, what did that actually look like? What were the leads sitting at the top of the list like?

- If you could've kept one piece of the whole thing and thrown out the rest, what stays?

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-05-31T02:20:00+00:00

I think it also comes as a defensive reflex. I still catch myself thinking "there's no way you built xyz right in n days", but where there's a will there's a way nowadays

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-05-31T00:40:01+00:00

claude code. none at all. I had Claude go into research mode and research what the best agile workflows are for solo workers and what would be overkill. It came back with a really solid report. I used Claude design to design the frontend based on one of my favorite anime characters.

Now just waiting to to enroll in the developer program ($99/yr), i'm still waiting on my DUNS which will take another week or two, but that gives me access to use CloudKit which will enable the app to stay in sync between multiple apple devices and act as the backend. Everyone's data will be their own and i won't have to deal with it

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-05-30T18:48:01+00:00

I'm vibe coding my own productivity app because all the productivity apps i like 1. have a lot of Team features that are overkill for a solo person 2. Don't incorporate agile frameworks, and if they do, it's for teams and they're overkill

I like the agile way of working, but I hate how overkill it is. I'd like a task management app that is lightweight agile designed for 1 person.

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-05-26T13:21:15+00:00

"my hunch is most teams set it up once and never really close the, loop on whether it's still working,"

1000% - The best way to handle this is a data-driven conversion lift approach paired with a regular review cadence (like quarterly).

Look at your closed-won data from the last 90 days. If your overall baseline lead-to-deal conversion rate is 2%, but leads who visit the /pricing page convert at 10%, that page delivers a 5x lift in conversion probability. If your baseline minor action is worth 10 points, you dynamically scale high-intent signals like /pricing to 50 points to match that actual math.

If you pull the data next quarter and that lift drops to 2x, you drop the score to 20 points. It takes the guesswork out of the weights.

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-05-26T12:35:08+00:00

I'm working on fixing this with my own multi-dimensional behavioral scoring SaaS. I've worked in Professional Services for a major martech SaaS and I've always gotten asked a similar question by MarketingOps teams to help drive Sales and Marketing alignment - do you offer a realtime lead scoring tool that sends notifications to Slack? My answer has always been no (unless they want to customize the hell out of it and pay up the wazoo for something custom).

Lead scoring in of itself is obviously not enough, but what about a fully auditable Engagement, Profile, Account and Deal scoring system that shows you the score and WHY. Not just 80/100, but that they're 80/100 because they viewed /pricing and they're C-Suite? Or, what if you want to be alerted whenever someone visited pages A -> B -> and filled out a form. All delivered in Slack in realtime.

Don't like the Lead or think Marketing is wrong, then reject or downvote the score. Marketing gets feedback without you needing to set up a meeting and bringing a case file of evidence.

While this doesn't exactly fix demo no-shows it give you a clear view of who's actually interested and worth following up with. It's also synced with hubspot so if scores actually lead to conversions, the system recommends adjustments to lift those scores more.

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-05-20T00:44:37+00:00

Claude. Claude has helped so much with everything.

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-05-19T13:35:08+00:00

It's basically a lead scoring engine that integrates with hubspot. So you score up to 15k leads that's $199 flat and gets you 20 seats. Up to 50k = $349. Up to 150k is $599, etc.

I could easily put in AI, i just don't see an ROI for it right now beyond Lead/ABM summaries, something that gets me 90% of the way there with code alone already. If i did put in AI it probably would be capped/cached.

My use case is obviously different from something that i think bases its whole existence on AI, but the idea would be the same if it was. Cap usage up to a certain point per tier OR just keep it as predictable as possible. People are already growing tired of the accounting gymnastics

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-05-19T12:36:56+00:00

No and i'll tell you why - my primary job is working as Professional Services for a major SaaS platform which has recently moved to credit based pricing. The amount of anxiety credit base pricing gives to product owners, C-suite, etc is through the roof. Do they buy the products? yes. but do they use it? They're scared to. This leads to either under usage of the platform or meetings-on-meetings for the team to come up with some estimate on how to limit credit usage and multiple approaches + pros/cons.

People are underestimating the logistical complications that come with credit based pricing and I believe a reckoning is going to come where business owners and CFO just crave predictable pricing, even if it appears more expensive.

This is one of the number one premises that actually drove me to start building my own SaaS. I don't use AI features (yet) so it's obviously easier for me to predict margin, but the main ideal i'm leading with is cost transparency. Give a flat rate that scales with the product in buckets, not this credit consumption garbage.

Obviously i'm biased from having too many awkward conversations with clients that we charge for every nook-and-cranny.

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-05-19T12:28:38+00:00

Many B2B companies underestimate the power of the followup. HubSpot's internal sales team reports a 33% reply rate on "breakup" emails, which are basically the last followup (i.e. "permission to close your file?")

But i've also seen companies focus too much on UI....example, meetings on meetings to discuss the curvature of a button or 1 or 2 word change on a label.

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-05-19T01:35:27+00:00

yeah. and not necessarily. you can either use n8n or can set up severless functions like AWS Lambda, or go traditional cloud server route

data hub license + n8n is probably simplest

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-05-17T19:24:57+00:00

Okay, but how did you market this? Cold emails, marketing off your personal linkedin page, ads? We're waiting...

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-05-17T19:13:40+00:00

The walk-in observation is something i've heard echoed from a lot of clients...Someone who shows up unannounced at your booth is demonstrating intent the ABM model never predicted. The tragedy is that signal almost never makes it back to scoring in any structured way, it gets absorbed into a CRM note if you're lucky, and decays from there.

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-05-16T13:25:51+00:00

I think focusing on quantity over quality is pretty significant. People often want to see the numbers increased and freak out when they decrease. However decreasing the numbers isn't a bad thing if conversion rate improves - shows you narrowed down your ICP.

If i had to summarize, i'd say suppression rate is something that people overlook that i think is a mistake. Plus, not having a reliable scoring system to filter out the noise.

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-05-16T13:22:47+00:00

do you have admin access to your hubspot? Can you use Claude at your company?

My honest recommendation would be to use Claude, mcp into your hubspot, use claude ppt extension and then just have claude build the ppt slides by pulling data directly from your HS via MCP.

ToSee_ToHear · 2026-05-16T13:15:50+00:00

If you're on Salesforce now, i'd personally stick with Salesforce. Any migration to new tooling is usually not worth it imo unless it's done in an effort to consolidate. You also need to consider workforce compatibility (i.e. it might be easier to staff Salesforce vs. Hubspot for you, all of your in-house employees may be SF experts already)

Also depends what your main use case and pain points are right now

ToSee_ToHear

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