Three people from the same plant visit your pricing page in the same week. An intern downloaded a whitepaper eleven months ago. In a default setup, the intern still has the higher score. That is what HubSpot lead scoring built for a 90-day funnel does to a 6-to-18-month industrial deal and it is why sales stops reading the MQL queue.
The fix is not a longer list of point values. It is HubSpot's current scoring tool used the way long cycles require: fit and engagement kept as separate scores, decay switched on, negative points doing real work, scores rolled up to the company so the buying committee counts as one account and a monthly session with sales to recalibrate the threshold. This post walks through each step.
Why 90-day scoring logic breaks on a ten-month deal
The average B2B buying cycle now runs about ten months, according to 6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience Report. Buyers complete roughly 60% of that journey before they engage a seller and 94% of buying groups have already ranked a preferred vendor before first contact. That preferred vendor wins 77 to 80% of the time.
The committee is large. Forrester's 2026 State of Business Buying puts the typical decision at 13 internal stakeholders plus 9 external influencers, with procurement acting as decision-maker in 53% of cycles. We wrote about what that does to industrial marketing in why your industrial marketing keeps losing the committee.
Put those two facts together and the default scoring model has two structural problems. It scores individuals when the buyer is a group and it scores activity after the form fill when most of the evaluation happened before it. A model that cannot see the group and cannot see the early stage will always flag the wrong person at the wrong time.
First, check whether your scores are still alive
Before redesigning anything, confirm your scores are updating at all. HubSpot retired its legacy manual score properties in 2025: new ones could not be created after May 1, 2025, existing ones stopped updating on August 31, 2025 and unused ones were deleted in the fourth quarter, per HubSpot's release announcement. There was no automatic migration.
We still find portals where routing workflows key off a frozen number from last summer. If that is you, the rebuild below is not optional. Be careful with what you read along the way, because some of the "HubSpot lead scoring" advice still ranking online describes the old tool. Anything that tells you to edit the HubSpot Score property is describing a feature that no longer moves.
HubSpot lead scoring today: fit and engagement as separate scores
The current lead scoring tool supports three score types: engagement, fit and combined. Contact scores need Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise; company scores need Marketing Hub or Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise; deal scores are a Sales Hub feature. AI-built contact scores are Marketing Hub Enterprise only and need a sample of at least 50 contacts, 25 converted and 25 not, before HubSpot will build them for you. Professional customers build scores by hand, which for a long cycle is the better place to start anyway.
The design principle comes from HubSpot's own growth team: fit tells you who could be a good customer; engagement tells you who is active right now. Keep them apart. The same post carries the line every scoring project should print out: the more complicated your lead scoring model, the less likely your sales team is to use it.
For a manufacturer, fit is firmographic and durable: industry, revenue band, plant count or region inside a rep's territory and role (design engineer, plant or operations lead, procurement). Engagement is behavioral and perishable: RFQ page visits, spec sheet and CAD downloads, pricing pages, return visits within a week. Combine them only where a workflow needs one number to route on. Everywhere else, sales should see both.
Configure decay and negative points for the long cycle
Decay is now native. In the build settings, an engagement or combined score can lose a percentage of its value at intervals of one, three, six or twelve months, with a linear decay curve. Set it on engagement only; fit does not expire because a plant is still a plant. For a 6-to-18-month cycle we usually start at a three-month interval, so a spec download from last quarter still counts, while one from a year ago does not outrank a pricing visit this week.
Negative points keep the score honest. Subtract for careers page visits, personal email domains, competitor domains, unsubscribes and titles you will never sell to. In a long cycle these matter more than in a short one, because a contact has eleven months to accumulate points for reasons that have nothing to do with buying.
Then let workflows act on the result: route above threshold, enroll a nurture below it, alert the rep when a fit-qualified company crosses an engagement line. We covered the workflow patterns in five HubSpot workflows that improve marketing results.
Score the buying committee, not the contact
Company engagement scores aggregate the actions of every associated contact, per the same build documentation. That is HubSpot's practical answer to the 13-person committee: three engineers each reading one spec page produces a company score that no single contact would reach. If your routing still fires on contact scores alone, the account with the most activity is invisible to it.
Two more layers help with the anonymous 60%. HubSpot's intent signals can feed company scoring, workflows and lists with research behavior from companies visiting your site and buyer intent surfaces visiting companies and their signals. Both consume HubSpot Credits, so budget for them rather than assuming they are included.
Committee scoring also changes what "qualified" means. Gartner's May 2025 survey of 632 B2B buyers found buying groups of 5 to 16 people across up to four functions, 74% of them showing unhealthy conflict during the decision and groups that reached consensus 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal. A company score that shows breadth across functions is a better predictor of a real evaluation than any one contact's total. That breadth is the signal the lead quality work we recommend for manufacturers is built to catch.
Your MQL threshold is a hypothesis
Nobody knows the right threshold on day one. Pick a number, then use the score history and performance reports (Professional and Enterprise) to see monthly score trends and what happened to contacts and companies that crossed the line. HubSpot's growth team ran monthly councils with sales reps for exactly this reason.
When sales ignores the MQL queue, the threshold is rarely the real problem. The definition is. Bring three or four recent MQLs sales rejected to the monthly review and ask why; the answer usually names a missing negative rule or a fit criterion that is too loose. Then write the two-way agreement down: what marketing hands over and how quickly sales works it. The same failure shows up in paid campaigns, where the leads look bad because the scoring and handoff were never designed and we broke that down in why manufacturers keep getting bad leads from paid campaigns. Our pipeline performance work exists to put that agreement into the CRM.
Build it once, then tune it monthly
Confirm your scores are updating. Split fit from engagement. Turn on decay for engagement, add negative points, roll scores up to the company and put a monthly review with sales on the calendar. That is the whole system and it fits a ten-month deal far better than the point tables most guides still publish.
If you would rather have a second set of hands on the rebuild, book a Growth Marketing Session. We have designed scoring and lifecycle logic inside HubSpot for manufacturers as a HubSpot partner since 2013 and we can tell you in one call whether your model needs a tune-up or a rebuild.
FAQ
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring assigns points to contacts or companies based on how well they fit your ideal customer and how they engage with you, so sales can prioritize the accounts most likely to buy. In HubSpot, fit and engagement can be separate scores or combined into one.
How does lead scoring work in HubSpot in 2026?
HubSpot's lead scoring tool builds engagement, fit or combined scores for contacts, companies and deals, with configurable decay and negative points. Contact scores need Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise; AI-built scores are Enterprise only.
What happened to HubSpot's old HubSpot Score property?
Legacy manual score properties stopped updating on August 31, 2025 and unused ones were deleted later that year. They were replaced by the lead scoring tool. Any workflow still keyed to an old score property is running on a frozen number.
What is a good MQL score threshold?
There is no universal number. Set an initial threshold, review score history and performance reports monthly with sales and adjust based on which contacts and companies above the line actually became opportunities.
Can HubSpot score companies and buying committees instead of individual contacts?
Yes. Company engagement scores aggregate the activity of all associated contacts and intent signals can add research behavior from visiting companies. For long, multi-stakeholder deals, company-level scores are usually the better routing signal.
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