Lead scoring against your ICP
Most scoring ranks people by title, industry and company size. That tells you who fits a category, not who is in a position to buy right now. Here is the framework we score against, and how a contact gets a score you can actually read.
Why field-based scoring does not rank the list
Job title, industry and company size are static. They describe what a person is, not what they are dealing with this quarter. Score only on them and the highest numbers go to the people who look most like your average customer, not the ones with a reason to reply.
Take two contacts. A procurement director at a large company can score high on every field and still have no need for you this year. A small importer with a broken supplier and a shipment due in three weeks can score low on company size and be the one email worth sending. The fields cannot tell those apart. The situation can.
The score answers a category question. You need it to answer a timing question.
What an ICP-based score should look at
These are the five dimensions we score a contact on. Each one is a question about the person's situation, not a field you can pull from a database.
| Dimension | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Trigger | Has something happened recently that makes the problem urgent? A new role, a lost supplier, a compliance deadline, a product launch. |
| Urgency | How much does the pain cost them right now? If nothing changes this month, what breaks? |
| Current alternative | What are they using instead today — a spreadsheet, an agency, an internal workaround? A weak alternative is a buying signal. |
| Decision power | Can this person say yes, or only influence? Budget owners and blockers score differently. |
| Reachability | Is there a real, current way in? A working email, a shared contact, a channel they actually read. |
The point is not the number at the end. It is that every point has a reason a human can read and disagree with.
How askuser.ai scores a contact against an ICP
Three steps. No field filters.
Turn one product sentence into an ICP profile
You describe your product in a sentence. We generate an ICP profile of 18 sections — 13 profile breakdowns plus 5 market materials — which is the yardstick every contact is scored against.
Match the profile against real buyers
The profile runs as a semantic search over roughly 100,000 real buyers. It returns the contacts whose situation lines up with the profile — not everyone in a category.
Each match comes with its reason
Every contact is returned with one line explaining why it matched. That line is the score's basis: you can read it, check it against the contact, and throw out a match you disagree with.
Free tier: one match a day, three contacts each; three ICP generations a day, one profile each. No credit card. Payment is not open yet — the free tier is fully usable on its own.
Replies are the real score
A score is a guess until someone answers. After matching, you draft a mail per contact and send it from your own mailbox. Links are tracked, and replies are read back from your inbox by IMAP.
Each reply is classified — interested, not interested, out of office, unsubscribe. That outcome is attached to the contact and to the profile it came from.
So the ICP profile gets scored by what real buyers did, not by how convincing our own summary looked. A profile that produces replies gets more weight; one that produces silence gets revised.
Score your list against an ICP you can check
Start with a product sentence. Get a profile, a first batch of matched buyers, and a reason for each one.
Free tier: one match a day (three contacts), three profiles a day. No credit card.