When it comes to filling communities or booking home care assessments, not every lead is created equal. Some families are ready to take a tour tomorrow, while others may just be browsing options for the future. The challenge? Your sales team’s time is limited — and if they’re chasing cold or unqualified leads, you lose valuable opportunities.
That’s where lead scoring comes in.
What Is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring is a simple but powerful system that assigns points to prospects based on their behavior, source, and engagement level. Think of it as a way to measure the “heat” of each lead — who’s most ready to move in, schedule a tour, or book an in-home assessment.
The beauty of this approach is that it only needs to be set up once inside your CRM (we use HubSpot or GoHighLevel with clients). From there, it runs automatically in the background, continually updating scores as leads take action.
"38% of businesses experienced higher lead-to- opportunity
conversion rates as a result of implementing lead scoring." - Kentico
How It Works
We start by creating a list of conditions. These could include:
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Source of the lead: Did they come from A Place for Mom, Caring.com, or your own website?
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Actions taken: Have they opened multiple marketing emails? Submitted more than one form? Requested information directly?
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Engagement signals: Are they clicking your emails, unsubscribing, or going quiet for 30–90 days?
Each condition is given a point value. Positive actions add points; disengagement takes points away.
For example:
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+10 points if they came from a referral partner
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+5 points if they submitted more than two forms on your site
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–10 points if they unsubscribed from emails
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–15 points if they’ve been inactive for 90 days
This way, a prospect’s score reflects both their level of interest and their likelihood to convert. You can use historical data in your CRM to help determine which actions are most important to weigh. That's why it can be really important to have a system that's tracking all your prospects interactions.
Adding a Profit Factor
For some clients, we also add a “profit factor.” For instance, if your organization pays high placement fees for certain lead sources, we can automatically adjust scores down to prioritize higher-margin leads. This keeps your sales team focused on the opportunities that make the most business sense.
Smart Alerts for Hot Leads
Here’s where having a marketing automation tool really shines. Once a lead crosses a certain threshold (say, a score of 85+), the CRM can send an automatic alert straight to your sales team’s inbox:
Subject: New Hot Lead Coming In!
Contact them now — they’re ready to tour.
This real-time notification ensures your team can act quickly before competitors do.
Visualizing Top Prospects
Lead scoring also makes it easy to see at a glance who deserves attention. Inside HubSpot, for example, we set up dashboards that rank leads by score and color-code them for clarity. Sales teams can log in and instantly know their top 5–10 prospects for the day.
Better yet, these reports can be emailed automatically to the right community or regional team on a weekly basis. That way, no one ever loses sight of their hottest opportunities.
Why This Matters for Senior Living & Home Care
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Saves time: Reps spend less time chasing unqualified leads.
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Improves conversions: You connect with prospects when their intent is highest.
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Customizable: Each community or agency can have scoring tailored to its unique business model.
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Scalable: Once built, the system runs automatically — no manual upkeep needed.
*Visual of a dashboard ranking leads by likelihood to close. This gives your sales people full transparency into which prospects to focus on.
A Low-Hanging Fruit with High ROI
At NextWave, we often set this up for clients free of charge as part of our onboarding process. It’s a quick win that delivers immediate value and becomes a foundation for smarter sales follow-up.
If you’re looking to prioritize leads, book more tours, and close more move-ins or assessments, lead scoring is one of the easiest ways to get started.
👉 Want to see how lead scoring can work for your community or agency? Reach out to us — we’ll be happy to walk you through a customized setup.
