Lead scoring is the practice of assigning points to individual leads according to their likelihood to convert, so that an email open might be worth 5 and a demo attended worth 20, with the running total deciding when marketing hands the lead to sales.
Lead scoring blends people into a single number, and that is the collapse The Demand Compass opens by attacking. A perfect contact at a perfect-fit company can open six emails, and none of that says whether the company has a reason to buy this quarter. The score says qualified; the rep hears curious. An account can know you well and have no reason to buy; another can have a screaming reason to buy and never have heard your name. A single lead score rates them the same.
The Compass scores accounts, not people, on two axes, with an audit trail. Same verb, opposite result. Brand awareness, whether the account knows and trusts you, is built over time. Readiness to buy, whether something is moving inside the account right now, is detected in a window. Keeping the two apart is what lets the position tell you the one move that fits, instead of handing sales a number that mixes a curious person with a buying company.
Person-level scoring throws two things away. The first is the anonymous docs reader: a system that scores people discards them because they are not a known contact, yet that reader was the earliest, best evidence the account was moving. Account-level scoring keeps it, because it needs the company, not the name. The second is time. A signal is evidence with a half-life, and readiness in particular has to decay, recent signals near full weight, older ones fading on a curve until they are gone. Let every point count forever and you do not have a compass, you have a graveyard that glows.
From The Demand Compass, by David Moreira and Marcos Stubrin. All terms · The book
