<![CDATA[Accurate lead scoring systems have become a strategic necessity for organizations operating in data-driven marketing environments, as they enable systematic identification of high-value customer prospects to maximize sales conversion efficiency. A fundamental challenge confronting conventional classification models is the class imbalance inherent in real-world marketing data, which induces majority-class bias and substantially reduces sensitivity toward minority-class prospects. This study proposes a Random Forest (RF)-based lead scoring prediction model integrated with the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) to address this limitation systematically. The dataset employed is the Lead Scoring Dataset from Kaggle, comprising 9,240 customer prospect records from an educational company with a class imbalance ratio of 1.59:1. Preprocessing included missing value treatment, removal of attributes exceeding 40% data loss, mode-based imputation, and categorical feature encoding. Following an 80:20 stratified split, SMOTE was applied exclusively to the training set to produce a balanced class distribution and prevent data leakage. The RF model was configured with n_estimators = 100, max_features = 'sqrt', and class_weight = 'balanced'. The proposed RF+SMOTE model achieved accuracy of 88.80%, precision of 86.44%, recall of 84.13%, F1-Score of 85.27%, and AUC-ROC of 0.9453, outperforming the baseline across four of five evaluation metrics. The most notable improvement was observed in recall, with a gain of 1.26 percentage points. Stratified 5-Fold Cross-Validation confirmed robust generalization capability, with AUC-ROC values consistently ranging between 94% and 95%. These findings demonstrate that the hybrid RF+SMOTE approach effectively enhances high-potential prospect detection while maintaining overall model stability for real-world Customer Relationship Management (CRM) deployment.]]>
