The general rule then, is that you want A+ grade prospects that have tallied up enough points that they are flagged in Pardot and pushed into Salesforce as being at the bottom end of the sales funnel - in that Consideration layer where they are looking at vendors and making purchase decisions. This is the ideal scoring and grading model.
Pardot lead scoring pipeline
Challenges of Pardot Lead Scoring
Theoretically, this all makes complete sense (I hope!).
In practice though, we’ve found that hungary telephone numbers many Marketing Managers face challenges such as:
How do I know how many points to assign per action?
What should the total lead score be before the leads are flagged as sales-ready?
I don’t have complete/fully developed buyer personas, how should I grade prospects?
What do I need to know when setting up an automated scoring and grading model in Pardot?
I’ll tackle each of these one-by-one.
How do I know how many points to assign per action?
I’ll be the first to admit there is an element of trial and error with this. Pardot does actually have a default baseline scoring model that you can use to take the hassle out of creating your own scoring system but as this is a generic system I’d suggest tailoring your own to fit your business and objectives once you have the data to do so.
Upfront, the most important thing to do is to analyse those prospects who have turned into customers and understand their journey because this will give you an initial idea as to how you should weight the scoring.
For example, if viewing a specific product page was a key part in their conversion then this will need a high score. You’ll also want to identify the engagement and conversion actions on your website that matters most to the business. Contact us pages tend to be weighted higher than a generic blog post, for example.
Start by reverse engineering your converted prospects and making a list of all the valuable engagement and conversion actions for your site and any communication channels such as email, then map these out in order of importance.
They might include:
Certain page views
Time spent on the website
Number of visits to the website
Content downloads
Attending an event
Use of Live Chat
Form enquiries
Email opens
Email clicks
Email responses
Video view completion rate
Once you have a clear map of what you want to score points for, start to draft a points value next to each one based on the journey that your customers took.
Think about what actions contributed to the conversion. Did they download a product whitepaper and purchase straight after? Or were there multiple actions taken between the download and the purchase?