Score Decay and Refresh Cycles

A deal score is not a photograph. It is a heartbeat monitor. A score of 82 two weeks ago means nothing today if no engagement has occurred since. Score decay is the mechanism that reflects this reality. Every day without engagement, the score drops by a defined increment. The decay rate is calibrated to your sales cycle — a ninety-day enterprise deal decays slower than a thirty-day mid-market deal. The principle is the same: a score without recent evidence is an outdated score, and outdated scores produce inaccurate forecasts.

The refresh cycle determines how often the score recalculates with new data. Real-time is ideal. Daily is practical. Weekly is the minimum. The refresh should incorporate every new data point: emails sent and received, meetings held, documents viewed, stakeholders added or removed. Each data point adjusts the score up or down. The result is a score that reflects the current state of the deal, not the state at the last manual update. When reps see scores that move, they take scoring seriously. When scores are static numbers assigned once, they ignore them.