How to score a Reddit lead in 60 seconds
Five checks before you reply: buyer or browser, real budget, timing now, your service, thread alive. Sixty seconds that saves your week.
Why scoring comes before replying
Most community leads are not leads. They are browsers, students, competitors, and people venting — mixed in with the few buyers who are ready to hire. Replying to all of them burns your week. Scoring first, in about sixty seconds, is what keeps your replies aimed at buyers.
This is a fast triage companion to our complete guide to lead scoring for community-sourced leads. The guide covers the full method; this is the version you run in your head before every reply.
The five checks
1. Is it a buyer or a browser?
A buyer asks for help, a recommendation, or a price. A browser asks for opinions, debates a tool, or shares a story. If the post does not contain a buying question, it is not a lead — no matter how interesting the thread is.
2. Is the budget real?
Look for signs the person will actually pay: they mention a budget, a deadline, or a business that depends on the outcome. "Just curious" and "for a school project" are not budgets.
3. Is the timing now?
"Need this by Friday" beats "thinking about it someday." Timing is the difference between a lead and a someday — reply to the urgent ones first.
4. Is it your service?
A buyer for a service you do not offer is not your lead, even if they are ready to pay today. Fit is a filter, not a detail — chasing wrong-fit threads is how weeks disappear.
5. Is the thread still alive?
A three-week-old thread with no recent replies is usually dead. Check the latest activity before you write — a great reply to a dead thread helps nobody.
Five yeses, reply now. Three or fewer, move on. That single habit is worth more than any tool, because it protects the one resource you cannot buy back: your replying time.
How Avrel does the same thing at scale
Scoring by hand works for a few threads a day. Across ten rooms, it breaks — which is why Avrel scores every post for buyer intent with the source attached, so you can see why it qualified instead of taking a number on trust. The habit above and the product do the same job: aim replies at buyers, not browsers.
And the habit that matters after scoring: follow-up. A scored lead with no follow-up is a wasted score.
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