Driving Success with Pardot Scoring & Grading

We marketers consider lead scoring, based on content and engagement, as a primary driver for improving revenue contribution. Over the last few years, prospective customers have been spending more time engaging with companies’ digital footprints prior to engaging with them. Scoring and grading provide visibility and some control over how prospective clients view, access, and research your organization.

Scoring and grading are important marketing automation tools to have in your toolbox. They allow you to focus your marketing engagement on the prospects that are most likely to purchase or make use of your offering, passing them to your sales team at just the right moment. Let’ dive a little deeper to understand how Pardot helps with each of these:

Scoring

A carefully structured scoring model can make it easier to segment and isolate your prospects. You can separate prospects that are just browsing from those that are actively seeking to engage with your services.

Think of Pardot as a shop assistant that stands in your shop and notes how customers are engaging with the products on the shelves. Some customers will focus on a specific area and pick items up to look at them. Others might wander the aisles because they happened to stumble upon your business. Just like a shop assistant should engage with these two customer types differently, so should your marketing automation system.

Pardot helps you identify the prospects that are actively engaging with your brand and know that they are different from those that are just browsing. Looking at a blog page on your site may not necessarily indicate the same interest as looking at your pricing page.

Your scoring model should be aimed at separating interest from intent. Get in touch with us for your marketing automation requirements.

Grading

Lead grading is the automatic segmentation of prospects based on preset criteria, to determine how close of a fit a prospect is to your ideal customer. Criteria examples include location, industry, job title, and company size. Let’s explore each of these in a little more detail:

Location

If location is import to your business, you can grade prospects based on where they are located. For example, if your primary market is a single country, you may not be as focused on prospects outside of your target country. On the other hand, a company with a global presence, may grade prospects if they do business in the same country as them.

Industry

Industry segmentation and grading can separate and categorize high priority industries. For example, if you provide solutions for manufacturers, targeting the manufacturing industry would be more useful than targeting the financial or Technology industries.

Job Title

Targeting by job title is a way to ensure you are targeting a person in a position of influence or with purchasing power. This avoids wasting resources on targeting prospects that may have little or no influence and decision-making power.

Company Size

Many of our customers are more interested in talking to a specific size of the prospect company, some might want to focus on small and medium size business while others on bigger accounts. The idea is to match your prospect grade to the correct company size and profile that makes for a good customer.

Most of the information required to set up a successful grading model will not come from marketing, but rather from sales. Your sales team is familiar with their ideal customers and engagement behaviors that indicate not just product interest, but buying signals.

Pardot helps with this by seamlessly passing qualified leads that match the customer profile to sales once they qualify based on their buying actions or if their lead score achieves the threshold set. This will ultimately prevent sales wasting time on prospects that are not a good fit for your products and not ready to engage in the sales cycle.

Changi is the region’s leading Salesforce partner with certified resources on Salesforce marketing automation solutions, Pardot and Marketing Cloud, and the only partner with most expertise delivering these Salesforce solutions in the EMEA region. Get in touch with us today to learn how marketing automation can help you save time and improve conversions.