---
title: 5.8 Contact Potential (Lead Scoring)
description: "Contact Potential automatically scores each contact's engagement and responsiveness and assigns a tier — Hot, Warm, Cold, or Pending — so you can…"
url: "https://peikly.com/docs/contact-potential-lead-scoring/"
updated: "2026-10-13"
category: "Contacts & CRM"
tags:
  - Manual sync
---

# 5.8 Contact Potential (Lead Scoring)

## What This Feature Does

Contact Potential automatically scores each contact's engagement and responsiveness and assigns a tier — **Hot**, **Warm**, **Cold**, or **Pending** — so you can prioritize outreach toward the contacts most likely to respond.

## When to Use

- Use to decide which contacts to follow up with first.
- Use to filter your contact list down to your most engaged leads before a campaign or outreach push.
- Do not treat a **Cold** or **Pending** tier as a reason to ignore a contact — it only reflects tracked engagement so far, not overall importance.

## Prerequisites

- A plan that includes contact potential analysis (check your plan's feature list, or ask your CompanyAdmin).
- The contact needs some tracked engagement history (email or WhatsApp activity) before a meaningful score can be calculated.

## What You See

**On the Contact Profile page**, a **Potential** card shows:

- A tier icon: fire (Hot), thermometer (Warm), snowflake (Cold), or hourglass (Pending).
- A score out of 100, with a trend arrow showing the change since the last calculation.
- The top signals driving the score.
- Four sub-scores: engagement, responsiveness, recency, and reachability quality.
- Details: email open/click rates, WhatsApp read/reply rates, average reply time, days since last activity, and total interactions.

**On the All Contacts list**, a **Potential** column shows each contact's tier and score, with a filter dropdown: All, Hot, Warm, Cold, or "Pending (not yet analyzed)".

## Tier Meanings

| Tier | What It Means |
| --- | --- |
| Hot | High engagement and responsiveness — score 70 or above |
| Warm | Moderate engagement — score 40–69 |
| Cold | Low tracked engagement — score below 40 |
| Pending | Not enough interaction history yet for a meaningful score |

## Smarter Analysis (AI)

When your plan's AI assistant is set up, Contact Potential also reads what actually happened in the conversation, not just the counters:

- **Automated replies count for less.** If a marketing broadcast triggers an out-of-office or "do not reply" auto-response, that is no longer treated as the contact showing interest. The Potential card shows what share of campaign replies looked automated.
- **Your notes are used.** The analyzer reads the notes you keep on a contact and factors them into the score. It also writes back the useful facts it finds in the conversation (role, budget, timeline, product interest) as new notes marked with an **AI** badge — so the next analysis is faster and you can see what it picked up. If you delete an AI note, it will not come back.
- **Follow-up requests are actioned.** If a contact asks to be contacted again at a later time ("call me next week"), the analyzer raises their potential and creates a follow-up reminder for the contact's owner at that time, in the owner's timezone. If the contact has no owner, everyone with access to the contact is notified instead.
- **WhatsApp forms count.** A contact who opens a form they were sent scores higher than one who ignored it. Completing a form scores highest. The Potential card names the form in its reasons, for example "Completed *Conference RSVP* on WhatsApp".

To keep costs predictable, the AI review runs only for contacts with genuinely new conversation activity, and at most once a week for everyone else.

## Recalculate a Contact's Score

1. Open the contact's Profile page.
2. On the **Potential** card, click **Recalculate Now** (visible to CompanyAdmin or users with edit permission).
3. The score refreshes immediately (a full AI review is included in a manual recalculation).

**Note:** This is rate-limited to once per hour per contact. Application also recalculates scores automatically in the background on a regular schedule, so manual recalculation is rarely needed.

## Errors, Messages, and Common Fixes

| Issue | Why It Happens | How to Fix |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Recalculate Now** button is missing | You don't have edit permission for this contact, or your role doesn't allow it | Ask your CompanyAdmin, or use an account with edit access |
| Recalculating has no visible effect | You already recalculated this contact within the last hour | Wait for the hourly limit to reset, or check back after the next scheduled background refresh |
| Contact stays in **Pending** | Not enough tracked interactions yet | Wait for more email/WhatsApp activity with this contact before expecting a tier |

## Best Practices

- Use the **Potential** filter on the All Contacts list to build a quick outreach list of your Hot and Warm contacts.
- Don't over-rely on manual **Recalculate Now** — scores refresh automatically as new activity comes in.