In the old days, we would refer to our leads as one of cold, warm or hot. Of course, they were subjective and also under the scrutiny of anyone who didn’t agree with the subjective categorization. This was a bone of contention between sales and marketing – one suggesting the leads were qualified and “good to go” – the other pushing them back and suggesting that they needed more qualification. At the end of the day, lead qualification was a guessing game based on variables that may or may not align with the business model.
Basic lead qualification has grown up some, and now we are in a position to customize and build a lead and grade scoring system that not only is objective, but it can provide both quantitative and qualitative assessment of those leads. To make it even more powerful, we can now customize those qualitative values to make them align with your business requirements.
Let’s start talking about the quantitative measure or scoring in Pardot and how it works. The scoring value represents activity and/or interactions with Pardot. It is activity that is specific to each individual prospect. Did they visit a landing page? Did they click on an email link? Did they submit a form? Did they visit your website and check out a few pages while they were there? These are all quantifiable measure that represent the score value in Pardot and ultimately on the lead or contact record in Salesforce. It measures engagement, it measures activity and it measures how effectively your marketing initiatives have been in driving traffic and activity to your digital marketing initiatives.
The Pardot scoring system makes it easier to reach your marketing goals because the more insights you gain from your prospects, the easier it becomes to create a more personalized experience. Also, by doing so, it allows the sales team to be able to better focus on the active prospects making their sales calls more efficient. Here’s the rub marketing folks, get sales involved in order to establish the values of each interaction and how much importance each should have on the overall score of the prospect.
How is lead scoring important? Simple, it measures the prospects engagement and interest in the products that you are marketing to them. It also allows you to create activities and segmentation based on that interaction. For example, you can use a certain score level as a way to qualify each lead. So, if a prospect score reaches 50, you can automatically send notification to the sales rep by way of a task assignment in Salesforce. Or perhaps you want to change the prospect’s grade because they are showing more interest in your products?
The quantitative part or the prospect grade is a measure of how well a prospect matches your ideal customer profile. It can be as specific as a particular title, like CEO or Director, or a geographical area, like Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver. It can also be industry specific, such as finance or manufacturing or any combination of those and other things. It allows a quick way to gauge how well the prospect fits your predefined target sales persona. The upside being that it ensures that your sales team are not spending excessive amounts of time working leads that do not fit your desired profile.
So, what does this all mean from a prospect perspective? It means that putting too much value in the activity levels alone is not an effective use of Pardot as a lead qualification tool. Adding in the prospect persona and clearly defining what that sales process and/or the ideal customer looks like will allow you to not only measure their engagement, but it will allow you to provide a quality score to supplement it.
Understanding Pardot’s lead scoring and grading tools and how to effectively apply them to your personal business requirements, is imperative for utilizing some of the key features of Pardot. If you are using Pardot currently and are not using lead scoring and grading as effectively as you could and would like us to give you some ideas on how to set it up – let us know and we will set something up. Or, if you are not currently using Pardot but think that this could be a benefit to you and your organization, we’d be happy to talk to you about it.
