How to Score a Lead List by Title, Email Domain and Country Before a Cold Campaign

Score the list, sort it, and send to the top first. Upload a CSV with a title column (and email and country, if you have them) to the lead scoring tool, adjust the points to your market, and press Score leads. The file comes back sorted highest first with an A to D grade and a score_reasons column ("VP +25; Sales +15; Company email +10"). Verify the A and B leads, and start the sequence with those.

Sources, read 2 November 2026: HubSpot's lead scoring overview and build lead scores articles (fit scores from properties like job title, engagement scores from actions, optional A to C thresholds), and RFC 2142, which defines shared mailbox names such as info@, sales@ and support@.

Fit, not engagement

CRM scoring tools usually combine two things: fit (who the person is) and engagement (what they've done). HubSpot's articles draw that line explicitly. A cold list has no engagement history yet, so its score can only be fit, from the columns the export holds. That's still enough to decide the order: the VP of Sales on a company domain in a country you serve before the intern on a Gmail address.

Default points

Signal	Points
Owner, founder or C-level	+30
VP	+25
Director or head	+20
Manager	+12
Target department in the title	+15
Any title keyword you add	+10
Excluded word (student, intern, retired, assistant to)	−30
Company domain email	+10
Free webmail or ISP email	−10
Role address (info@, sales@)	−10
No email	−20
Target country	+10

Grades: A at 50 or more, B 30 to 49, C 15 to 29, D below 15. All of it is editable.

Step by step

1. Clean the inputs. Run the title column through the job title normalizer so "SR. VP, SALES @ ACME" reads as a VP, and standardise the country column with the country name normalizer.
2. Upload to the lead scoring tool and set the departments you sell to, any keywords, words to exclude and your target countries.
3. Score and read a sample of each grade. If a whole group lands in the wrong grade, change the points rather than editing rows.
4. Cap contacts per company if the list has many people at one account; the contacts per company post explains why.
5. Download the A and B leads and verify them on the verify page.
6. Send the valid A and B leads first, then work down as capacity allows.

Honest limits

• Three columns of fit. Rules can't see intent, budget or timing.
• Title patterns. An unusual title can land in the wrong seniority level; the reasons column makes those easy to spot.
• Webmail penalty is a default, not a truth. Change it for small-business markets.
• Fit isn't deliverability. A grade A row can still be an address that doesn't exist; B2B contact data decay covers how quickly that happens.

Where SimpleVerifier fits

Check the top grades on the verify page; the first 100 checks are free with a Google sign-in. Pro is $39 a month with the first 100,000 checks a month at full speed, then slower, never cut off. See pricing.