Fit vs Intent in Lead Scoring:Keep Them Apart
Fit vs intent in lead scoring: who they are against what they are doing. Why you should keep the two apart, make fit a gate, and let intent rank the queue.
Fit vs intent in lead scoring comes down to two questions. Fit: can this person actually buy from you? Intent: are they behaving like someone trying to solve your problem right now? Score them on separate axes. Add them together and you can no longer tell which one you are measuring.
Fit vs intent in lead scoring: two questions hiding in one
"Is this a good lead?" sounds like one question. It's two.
Fit asks who they are. Intent asks what they're doing. Mix them and you get a number that means nothing, because nobody can read it.
Here's the proof. Picture two people on your list, both with a score of fifty. One is the perfect buyer who signed up eight months ago and never came back. The other is a very keen reader who visits daily and could never afford you. Same number. Opposite situations. One needs patience. The other needs removing from your list.
A single score can't say which is which. And that is exactly the thing you need to know before you spend a call.
Fit: who they are
Fit is the stable part. Their role. The type of business. The size. Where they are. Whether they sit in a market you serve at all.
It barely moves. A buyer doesn't stop being in your market because they went quiet. So fit should never decay. Not a little. Not at all.
Ask yourself one thing: could this person plausibly pay? Not "would they like it." Could they pay.
That sounds obvious. Then look at your list. How many people on it are students, competitors, job seekers, or readers who simply enjoy your writing? Quite a few, I'd bet. They are lovely. They are not leads.
Free guide · 21 pagesRation the one thing you cannot scale.The Lead Scoring Playbook: deciding which leads deserve your time.Get the free guide →Intent: what they are doing
Intent is the volatile part. It's what happened this week. A page read. A form filled. A pricing page visited twice. An assessment completed.
It moves fast and it fades. A call request from yesterday and one from eight months ago aren't the same signal. That's why behaviour decays and fit doesn't. We cover the pace in how to decay a lead score.
Intent is also where noise lives. One person clicking everything looks identical to one person comparing options before buying, until you look at what they did. Hence the tiers: passive, engaged, deliberate, hard-offer. Cost to the person is the clue.
The four-way split
Keep fit vs intent apart and four situations appear. Each one deserves a different action from you.
| Situation | What it looks like | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Fits, and active | The right kind of buyer, doing the right kind of things. | This is your queue. Work it first. |
| Fits, and quiet | A perfect-fit buyer who has done nothing yet. Not ready. | Nurture. Don't chase. Let your emails do the waiting. |
| Does not fit, and active | Lots of clicks, but they could never buy. Not a lead at all. | Keep them out of the queue. Enjoy the readership. |
| Unknown, and active | You don't have the data to say whether they fit. | Treat as unknown. Look at what they did, and find out. |
Look at row three. A summed score ranks that person above the quiet buyer in row two. That's the commonest scoring absurdity there is. A flood of activity from someone who can never buy outranks a quiet signal from someone who could.
Fit vs intent: make fit a gate, not a score
Here's what I'd do, and what the guide recommends for most small businesses.
Don't give fit points. Make it a gate. Three states: fits, doesn't fit, unknown. Then let intent do the ranking among the people who pass.
Why? Because gates are honest and points aren't. Points suggest precision you don't have. A gate says: either this person belongs in the queue or they don't.
It also fixes the temptation to build an elaborate fit model. Points for job title, points for business size, points for industry. Looks serious. Then you open the data and discover the fields are empty for most contacts, because nobody fills in their job title on a newsletter form.
A fit score built on mostly empty fields isn't a measurement. It's a default value wearing a disguise.
Unknown is not average
This is the detail that saves you from yourself.
When you don't know whether someone fits, say so. Don't give them a middling score. A middle score pretends you looked and found "so so". You didn't look. You have no data.
Treat unknown as unknown. Then do something about it. Ask a question on the next form. Check their reply. Notice which contacts reach your call list with the field still empty, because those are the cases where the gate is hiding a decision from you.
Grow the model into something richer when the data genuinely exists. Not before. Not because a template had a row for it.
Free assessmentHow trapped are you, really?Take the Corporate Suffocation Index, the free solopreneur readiness assessment.Take the assessment →Two traps in the fit rules
The personal email penalty. It's often recommended. It makes sense when you sell to companies and want to filter out individuals. But if your buyers are individuals, other solopreneurs, freelancers, professionals buying for themselves, a personal address is the norm. Penalise it and you remove your best customers.
So decide it on purpose, based on who actually buys from you. Not on what a tool defaults to.
Big negatives for bad fit. Competitors researching you, your own addresses, test addresses, people who never agreed to hear from you. The urge is to give them a huge negative score. Resist it. Enough activity can outweigh any negative number, and the reason for the exclusion disappears into arithmetic.
Make them explicit exclusions, with a stated reason. "Competitor." "My own address." Reasons you can read back later.
Why intent gets the ranking
Once fit is a gate, intent can do its job. And it can do it honestly, because everyone it ranks is someone you could serve.
The ranking works best when you've sorted behaviours by what they cost the person. Reading a page costs almost nothing. Coming back costs some attention. Completing an assessment or submitting a form costs real effort and information. Asking for pricing or a call is an explicit request to be sold to.
Each tier should be worth several times the tier below. The ratios matter more than the numbers. If enough of the cheap behaviour can add up to the expensive one, the score is measuring traffic, not intent. The rule that stops this has its own post: how to cap lead scoring signals.
The quiet buyer lives in the gap
Separate the two and something useful happens. You can finally see the person who fits, is moderately active, and has done one very telling thing. Say a business owner who matches your buyer, reads your pricing page twice and downloads the guide only serious buyers download. That is an archetype, not a case.
Added together with a hundred enthusiastic readers, they disappear. Kept apart, they sit at the top of a short queue.
That's the whole point of scoring: finding the person who never announced themselves. More on that in how to catch the quiet buyer.
Free guide · 21 pagesRation the one thing you cannot scale.The Lead Scoring Playbook: deciding which leads deserve your time.Get the free guide →Do this in an afternoon
- Write who is not a fit, and why. Three lines is plenty. Students, competitors, whoever your product genuinely doesn't serve.
- Count how many contacts have the fields your fit rule needs. If it's few, use the three-state version and move on.
- Decide the personal email question. Look at your last buyers. Which addresses did they use?
- Sort your behaviours into tiers. Four tiers. Cost to the person decides the tier.
- Check you aren't adding the two together anywhere. If a tool or spreadsheet is, split it.
That's it. No clever formula. Two columns, not one.
Fit vs intent in one line: fit is who they are, intent is what they're doing. Keep them apart and your queue starts telling the truth.
Free assessmentHow trapped are you, really?Take the Corporate Suffocation Index, the free solopreneur readiness assessment.Take the assessment →Frequently asked questions
What is the difference in fit vs intent?
Fit is who someone is: role, type of business, size, market. It is stable. Intent is what they are doing right now, and it is volatile. A perfect-fit buyer who has done nothing is not ready, and an active person who could never buy is not a lead.
Should fit be a score or a gate?
For most small businesses, a gate. Each contact fits, does not fit, or is unknown. Intent then ranks the people who pass. This avoids the absurd case where heavy activity from someone who can never buy outranks a quiet signal from someone who could.
What do I do when I do not have fit data?
Treat the contact as unknown, not as average. Fit rules built on mostly empty fields are a default value in disguise. Start with the three states and grow the model when the data genuinely exists.
Should fit ever decay?
No. A buyer does not stop being in your market because they went quiet. Behaviour should fade over time, but fit stays put.
The full method, with the checklists, is in The Lead Scoring Playbook, a free 21-page playbook.
How trapped are you, really?
Take the Corporate Suffocation Index, the free solopreneur readiness assessment.