Account and lead scoring is going through a quiet correction. Reps who’ve been burned by a black-box score before don’t extend faith easily, and for years that’s exactly what scoring tools asked for: trust the number, work the list, no reasoning shown. That default is losing ground fast, and the category is responding by opening up how a score actually gets built.

That shift toward explainability is real progress, but it isn’t the whole fix. A rep who can finally see the reasoning behind a score also gets a clearer view of that score being wrong. Visibility doesn’t discriminate between good logic and bad logic, it just shows both more clearly, which means transparency alone can make an untrustworthy tool easier to catch, not easier to trust.

The paper below argues that closing the trust gap takes three things holding together at once: a score reps can see through, adjust to match the account knowledge they already have, and pull from more than one signal, natively inside the Salesforce workflow reps already live in every day.