Speaker 0: Your presentations. Alright, everyone. Welcome to MarDreamin’. My name is Joel Alfonso from Sercante, and I will be moderating today’s session. Here are a few reminders. Yes. We’ll be recording these sessions, and they will be made available on demand after the event. And we’ll be also following up with them via the email. At any point in time, if you would like to join another track, on the bottom left hand side of your screen, please click on Change Track, and it would take you to the agenda. If you have any questions, please post in the Q and A tab at the top right hand side of your screen. And thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We have an amazing speaker joining us who’s going to share some great insights on how to optimize Marketing Cloud Account Engagement scoring rules and categories. Thank you, Chris, for presenting with us today. Over to you.

Speaker 1: Perfect. Yeah. Thank you very much. Um, and hello to everyone in the call. Like I said or like I’ve been introduced, my name is Chris. And today, I will be providing you with an introduction on how to optimize Marketing Cloud Account Engagement scoring rules and scoring categories. So a little bit about myself. I’m a Digital Marketing Development Manager within the Marine Power Marketing Operations team as well as a Market Specialist. I work for a Finnish company called Wärtsilä. Wärtsilä is a global leader in innovative technologies and life cycle solutions for both the marine and energy markets.

Okay. So today, what I will try to do or try to cover and provide you with is an introduction to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement scoring, scoring categories, as well as a process or framework to identify and rank key touch points across a customer’s journey, the process of developing a customized scorecard to meet your specific business needs, as well as the technical setup when it comes to your lead strategy. So we’ll look at automation rules and engagement programs, as well as some of the key areas that you may want to look or review when it comes to identifying and looking for improvements for your lead strategy.

Okay. So let’s start. So scoring. What is scoring? Scoring is essentially a measurement or an indicator of a prospect’s level of interest or intent. The score itself is a numerical figure, and it’s assigned to a prospect whenever they engage in a marketing activity, providing it’s tracked in your automation tool. The score itself is based on implicit interest or implicit information, and this is towards a particular product, solution, or service that is offered by your business. Meaning that this is information that we then use to assume or suggest that prospect’s interest, and something that isn’t directly expressed by the prospects themselves. Therefore, it’s our task as as marketers and sales professionals to use this measurement, to use this indicator, to determine which prospect we should be prioritizing and which ones we shouldn’t. The score or a score can increase or decrease whenever they engage in a particular marketing activity. So for instance, if it’s a valuable touch point that would influence, say, decision making process or the prospect’s decision making process, we’d look to increase a prospect score. Whereas if it’s potentially a negative touch point, so say you’ve got a prospect, and they’re engaging with, say, a careers page so they might be a job seeker, we may look to reduce a prospect score. Now these touch points could be almost anything across a customer’s journey. It could be anything from a a link click to an email open, potentially a page view, a social media interaction, a content download, an event registration or attendance, as well as a contact us form submission. Now luckily for us, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement offers us a scoring system by default, and this can be completely customized to meet our specific business needs as well as lead generation strategy. There are a few points to note. When it comes to scoring, a prospect score can be modified during imports, it can also be changed manually, and it can also be reset to zero.

Now grading. I haven’t mentioned grading in the agenda and I’m not going to spend too much time on it but when we look at the the lead strategy part, scoring and grading really go hand in hand. One isn’t better than the other and you’re both and you’ll definitely be utilizing both areas when it comes to setting your criteria and pushing prospects for lead qualification. So what is grading? Grading is essentially a measurement of a prospect’s value or their importance for your business. It’s essentially a letter that is assigned to the prospect based off of their profile and how well this profile matches your business’s set criteria. And now this set criteria is essentially your ideal customer profile. The grade itself is measured on explicit information, which is usually provided in the form of a form submission, and it could be information such as job title, location, and company size. So in this instance, you definitely want to be utilizing progressive profiling, as this will ensure that you develop forms, got good user experience, and achieves a good conversion rate. But it also means that you can then capture a greater volume of prospect data as and when they revisit your site and continue to submit the form. A grade runs from F to A, and this increases or decreases in increments of thirds. Any new prospects that are entering your database will typically start on a grade of D by default, and then depending on how well the information matches your ideal customer type, that’s their grade will either increase or decrease.

Okay so now we know a little bit more about scoring and grading, how are these used together? So these will form sort of the critical component when it comes to your lead strategy. So what you’re essentially looking for are prospects of a high score and a high grade, meaning that you’re looking for prospects that are highly interested in a particular product or solution that you offer, as well as those who are of high importance, so those that are going to potentially generate the most revenue, and maybe have sort of the most expenditure when it comes to their life cycle. Each of these are calculated independently and of course you should only be creating leads or pushing prospects for lead qualification when each of these two set criterias are met.

Okay. So now we know a little bit more about scoring and grading, how can we optimize specifically the scoring element to meet our specific business needs? So let’s first start and take a look at scoring rules. What we essentially want to do is develop a scorecard. A scorecard is essentially touch points across a customer’s journey, that we wish to track and score accordingly. Now these can either be scored based on a prospect’s overall score or towards a prospect’s scoring category. So to start off with, it’s really a moment of reflection, and it’s really asking ourselves and identifying what it is that we’re currently tracking, what aren’t we tracking, and what should we be tracking. Now again I think a lot of us thought sort of marketing operation experts as well as sales teams and operation experts I think we we have a tendency to want to track and monitor everything so if you’re quite new in this process, if you’re quite new in this topic, then I recommend you start small and sort of grow your volume or your range of data as and when you have a better understanding and a purpose of sort of comprehensive of your your customer, um, journey and life cycle. So what you are trying to do is identify touch points that are the most influential and generate the most engagement, and you can also apply the same logic when it comes to your your website or your page content. So in this instance, you’d be using page actions, and this will enable you to apply a score based on how valuable each, or how valuable different pages are on your website. And then as a basic rule of thumb, the more informative, the more specific the content, the more persuasive it should be. Therefore, the likelihood is going to be more influential when it comes to a prospect’s decision making process. So the task is quite simple. What we’re looking to do is isolate touch points or engagements across a customer’s journey that impact their buying decision process.

So how do we do this? Well, we would first look to map all of the touch points we wish to track. We then need to rank these touch points based on their influence and engagement. To do this, we could utilize audits, we could utilize reports, prospect activity data, as well as dashboards. If you have engagement history activated in Salesforce, you can also view this activity on the contact and the level. You then need to apply an appropriate score for each of these touch points based on their value, and then all of this will have to be relative to an MQL threshold. And that is essentially the the total figure that you that you will use to then identify interested prospects. And then, of course, all of the above has to be optimized based off of your customer’s journey, and their decision making process. And, again, this is somewhat subjective and somewhat relevant, or relative based on your industry. So if you’re in a B2B industry, you’re going to notice that the lead times are slightly longer, so you might have a slightly higher lead threshold, meaning it gives you an opportunity to, um, not nurture pros- nurture prospects. Whereas if you’re in a B2C industry or, say, a fast moving consumer goods industry where your churn rate is that bit higher, you might notice that the lead time is significantly lower. Therefore, the MQL threshold will also be lower.

Once you’ve then done this what you will essentially need to do is then navigate through your Lightning app and you’ll go to Pardot Settings, Automation Settings, and Scoring, and then within that viewpoint you will see a list of any existing scoring categories and scoring rules. And what you will essentially try to do is develop a set of scoring rules or a list of scoring rules that look something like this. Then each of these touch points have a different score based on their value and then this is based off or or sort of subjective to a threshold of 100 points. And then sort of a final illustration, to hopefully provide more of a visual aid, what you’re trying to do is identify or rank touch points. So those that have lower value or a touch point of lower value and lower influence will be scored lower, whereas those of higher value and higher influence will be scored higher.

Okay. Scoring categories. Scoring categories are a great way and a very powerful tool to provide your business with scoring segmentation. They essentially allow you to look at your existing product or service portfolio and break into specific business lines or product lines. This then allows you to obviously start to generate and nurture leads, push those for qualification based off specific interest within sort of segmented areas of your product portfolio. Scoring categories also allow you to connect or can also be connected to folders, meaning that anything that is then placed within those folders, so any content, any marketing related activities, are then scored towards that specific category based on the scoring rules that you’ve set from the previous slide. There are a couple of things to note though. When you are using categories and if they aren’t tied to a specific folder, you need to apply the score via completion action. If you are using scoring rules and you don’t have a category associated with a folder you’ll notice that these scoring rules by default are then aggregated towards the prospect’s overall score. And again you don’t need a category for everything so it is important that you do take a a look at your your current business structure and you don’t get in the habit of trying to create a a category for each and every product because what you can end up doing or what you can end up doing is having a very dispersed and very broad range of categories and you end up losing interested prospects. So you could have a prospect that’s heavily engaged and and showing a lot of interest but they never reach any of your categories because you have such a broad range, meaning that then that sort of warm or hot lead becomes cold and either goes to a competitor or loses interest.

There are a couple of considerations. So if you are using categories, they typically sync with Salesforce approximately every fifteen minutes. Depending on the tier system you’ve purchased, there could be a limitation of 50 categories. Categories can’t be manually a decision on prospects record. They aren’t supported in a person accounts but are included in the full prospect CSV reports. And just like scoring rules, you would navigate from Pardot Settings, Automation Settings, and Scoring. What you would then do is see a blue button that is Add Scoring Category. You’d click on that. You would then name the category based on the product or business focus. And again, when it comes to the naming convention, it’s advisable that you keep this quite simple. It’s okay if you know what it means, but I think at a snapshot, I think the rest of your team and the rest of your organization also needs to understand what this category is and what it’s scoring towards. You then need to select the start date and choose if you wish to include any historical activities so if you want to attribute any existing materials in that folder and you can then also have the option to choose a folder through this part here and then once you’ve selected the correct folder you just Create Score and Category.

So how does this look in practice? So as I mentioned, you take a view at your or a reflection at your existing business structure, and you’re looking to group products or services from your portfolio into specific categories. So say, for instance, you worked for an automotive company and you sold a range of vehicles from Hatchbacks, Saloons, Coupes, and SUVs, you’ve already then got sort of four established categories. One thing you might want to do or a couple of things you might want to do when it comes to looking to optimize these, You may want to ask yourself, does the customer journey or is the decision making process slightly different for each of these categories? So is there is there more risk associated to one purchase than the other? If there is, you then may want to adjust the MQL threshold to reflect this. Once you’ve then done that, within the Lightning app, you’ll have a viewpoint that looks something like this. So when you have your list of folders, in this instance, we’ve got a separate folder for each vessel vehicle type. We then also have the scoring category that is tied to that. So here you see, hatchback marketing campaigns. So all marketing campaigns, all related assets and activity will be placed within this folder. And then based on those scoring rules that you set, they will then be aggregated towards the Hatchback lead scoring category.

So what are the benefits of this? Well, categories allow you to score prospects in more than one product, making it easier to determine the level of interest per category. This also offers cross selling and upselling opportunities. So meaning if you notice a prospect has reached one threshold but is also really close to a couple of others, it gives you an idea to then or gives you the ability to then customize your proposal and maybe include more of your products, more of a portfolio potentially expanding that customer share. This in turn offers offers also offers you more granularity when it comes to analyzing prospects activity for lead qualification and conversion. So what I mean by that, if you then snapshot can easily identify that, say, the prospect was interested in hatchbacks, you set really the task of the salesperson to identify maybe whether it’s a a three door model or a five door model, and really the spec, is sort of the the challenge then to try and determine. A couple of points to remember, a prospect’s overall score can be reset without impacting a category, whereas a prospect category score can’t be reset but it can be reduced.

Okay so to summarize, we’ve got a better understanding of what scoring and grading is, we also know what scoring rules are and how develop and how to develop a list of scoring rules that are optimized for our specific businesses, and we also know how to provide our business with some scoring segmentation.

So how can we optimize this for our lead generation strategy?

So let’s first look at the technical setup. So finally you’ve done the above, what you then need to do is look at considering which automation tool or which path you’re going to choose to use and really the two most powerful tools will either be automation rules or engagement programs. I won’t I’ll cover probably both steps, and then I’ll provide an example of what it of what it would look like if we went down the automation route. So both, an automation role and engagement program start in a paused state. Depending on the tier system you purchase, there will be a limited number of automation rules that you’re allowed. This could be, I think, 5, 100, and 150. It’s advisable that if you are using automation rules, you typically use one automation rule per category. This helps you reduce the complexity and then obviously sort of limit potentially any errors. But one thing to note is that depending on how many categories you then have, so say for instance you have 10 categories, but you only had 50 automation rules, you’ve then already sort of used the 20%, of your allowed or allotted automation rules. So just be mindful, how many categories you’ll need and then try to select, which is a relevant tool. If you’re going down the engagement program route, you’ll be utilizing a dynamic list, and the dynamic list will set your your rules or your set criteria, essentially, the kind of prospects you want to target. Depending on the tier system you purchase, there will be a limitation on the total number of repeating repeat engagement programs that you’re allowed, and there’s also a max of 300 steps per program. So obviously make sure whichever one you choose you need to test thoroughly, preview and obviously yeah test before starting. And then lastly what you’ll also need to do and now this is considering how often the customer life cycle sort of repeats itself itself. So when you go from say prospect to lead, back to prospect. So you’ll also need to specify if these actions are to repeat and if so how often should they.

Okay. So let’s say for instance we’ve chosen, as we’ve only got four categories, let’s say we’ve chosen the automation rule. What we then need to do is look at setting our lead criteria. So the kind or identifying the kind of prospects that we want to push for qualification. So we may want to ask ourselves, okay. So is there anyone within our database that we wish to exclude? So are we looking to exclude competitors, job seekers, suppliers? How often should the prospect repeat the action? So, again, depending on your industry, so if you’re in a B2B or in a B2C, you’re going to have varying lead times and varying customer journeys. So if you are in a B2B, you might have a slightly longer repeat time, whereas in a B2C, you’re going to find that you have a slightly shorter lead time. You also need to ask or consider who within your organization is going to handle these leads. So is it a particular queue or a specific user? You’ll also want to consider how your organization is synced with Salesforce. So is the contact and lead creation enabled, or is tasks the only option? And then once you know this, you then know if you’re setting up an automation rule to create a new lead and assign that to a particular queue or user or whether you’re then creating a task and assigning that instead. You’ll then also want to ask yourself okay are we going to reset the prospect score? So are we looking, are we looking to try to create an environment where a prospect would go from zero or close to zero to 100 and then back to zero again? And the idea is is that customer life cycle starts and ends from zero to 100. We also then need to remember that actions are executed on the top to bottom logic so we need to structure those actions accordingly.

What we have here then is, a a very basic automation rule example, and it’s based off of the assumption that we have, a queue. So the organization or the person that would be responsible for the leads is a specific queue. We’re also making the assumption that our organization is synced with Salesforce and the contact and lead creation is enabled. So in this instance we’ve set it up so we’ve got a new lead creation. So how would it look? Well, an automation rule in its simplest form is kind of split into two main categories or two main sections. We have a rule section, which we will use to form the basis of our set criteria, and then we have a action section. So whenever someone meets this set criteria, these actions will then be applied.

So what do we first have to do? Well, let’s first look at scoring. So we have to look at identifying prospects that appear to be interested in one of our services or products. So we first look at setting the first rule. So we’d have a Prospect Score for Scoring Category. In this instance, we’ve gone back to the hatchback example. So we’re looking for someone within that category that has a score of greater than 99. So just to point out, obviously, we want to ensure that it the score doesn’t have to be a 100, meaning that anyone over a 100 then wouldn’t be included within this viewpoint. So make sure that it’s greater than 99. So we’ve got the we’ve got the interest covered, But how do we then ensure that we’re only pushing quality at least to sales or or specific users? So let’s look at setting the Prospect Grade. So we want to ensure that we’ve got the prospect grade is greater than C. Now, again, depending on your your database, and the kind of profiles that you have, you also then need to sort of adjust the grade. So if you sort of notice that the leads are slightly poor in quality, you may want to increase that grade. If you find that you’re not producing enough or the the conversion rates are really high, you might want to extend that to see if you can capture more leads. You may also want to consider or ensure that the lead is still hot. So you may want to try to or add a rule that looks to make sure that the prospect’s been recently active. So what you would do is select the prospect time or prospect’s last activity was less than fifteen days. Now, again, depending on your lead times, you could just adjust this to say a couple of days up to a month, whatever it might be.

Then let’s look at the actions. So as I mentioned we would look to reset our prospect score to create that lead life cycle so we aim to reduce the prospect category score by 99. Again remember then that a category score can’t be reset but it can be reduced. We then also might want an active list of assigned leads as well as an active list or an active campaign a list of campaign members, of assigned leads. We could say Add Prospect to List, Hatchback MQL Assigned, and we could also have Add CRM Campaign, Hatchback MQL Assigned with the status MQL. And then finally, and this is going off the assumption that we have a queue and contact lead creation, We then have Assign Prospect to Queue Automotive Vehicles, Sales and Lead Management. Now looking at the repeat time, we want to specify that this rule can repeat. We also want to specify how many days have to pass before, the prospect is eligible to repeat this program. So I’ve gone seven in this example. Again, adjust as to how you see fit and your sort of basic customer life cycle. And then you also need to mention about whether these or whether or not these rules will be limited or sorry if there’s any match limitation in which case you’ve said no there’s no sort of it’s completely unlimited. So once we’ve reviewed this we would have tested it and then we can then start the automation rule.

Now let’s say, for instance, we’ve got, or we’ve started the automation rule, and it’s been in circulation for a few months, and it’s now that point where we want to start benchmarking and reviewing and looking for improvements. So some of the questions may we may want to ask ourselves is, how many leads are converting per category? So are we noticing any trends? Is there any changes in product demand for a particular category? What is the opportunity lost versus won rate? So are the leads of good quality? Do we need to adjust the grade that we’re using in the automation rule, or do we need to go one step further back and look at the customer profiles and maybe make some adjustments there? Are any categories performing better than others? So, again, this is more to do with the actual threshold, but if we notice that actually, you know what, there’s nothing wrong with the grade, so to speak. The categories are all quite similar. Is it a case that we need to maybe increase or decrease that lead threshold? Are any scoring rules or any touch points needed to be reviewed or adjusted? So is one touch point getting a lot of traction, showing a lot of engagement, but yet the overall result or the overall quality of that conversion is quite low? So we may need to adjust and reduce maybe or even increase a scoring rule. Is a repeat time sufficient? So are you producing enough leads? Does this need to be shortened or extended? Again, looking at the quality, looking at this sort of churn rate and and your performance when it comes to the closed won rate, a load are all indicators which will help you to determine whether these repeat times should be shortened or extended.

If everything is performing well then a couple of things that you can look and maybe ask yourself and your team, how can we leverage the existing data that we have? So how can we leverage now the sort of prospect activity data dashboard, and the information that we have within Salesforce to shorten the customer journey? So how can we sort of pinpoint those top performing touch points, and to sort of optimize those and leverage those to shorten a prospect journey from prospect to lead? How can we increase the share of existing customers? So again, leveraging categories and using cross selling and and upselling strategies. How can we sort of develop proposals and present or deliver proposals that are going to increase a customer’s share or their expenditure. Now if we take a look or focus on improving sort of data acquisition, we want to look at, okay, well, how do we attract and win new customers? So how can we, um, generate more prospects? So how can we increase the visitor to prospect conversion rate, allowing us to then have a a greater pool of potential, or a greater pool of prospects, meaning that we then might have a a greater chance of producing more leads, every calendar year as and when our database grows.

This is what’s one of my final slides. And if you’re going to take anything away from this presentation, the key is really collaboration. This might this task kind of might be maybe the the main responsibility of an operations professional, but it’s one of those where this is truly a truly a, a collaborative exercise, one in which you need to be transparent and open with other stakeholders. So you want to be you want to ensure that you then work with sales and customer success functions, of course, other colleagues within your operations team and the wider marketing team, campaign owners, and any sales and strategy team. So what you need to ensure is, and what is important that these functions need to know how this process works, maybe not to sort of an expert detail, but they need to know, what this process is doing, how it works, and what the end result is, or what it is you’re trying to achieve. It might seem quite simple, but they also need to understand what a marketing lead is. I think sometimes if we make the assumption that everyone knows what a marketing lead is, but I think from person to person that, that opinion or that viewpoint sometimes differs. So I think it’s very important to clearly define what a marketing lead is and when you sort of identify them and when they push for qualification. Any sort of presales and then customer success teams, and even sales teams also need to know what action to take. So when these leads or tasks appear to a appear in a particular queue or for a specific user, the person in question or that stakeholder in question has to understand what prospect data activity is. They also need to know how to develop those proposals and how to interpret that information So they can have them themselves can then get a very good understanding and a clear understanding of what that prospect is interested in. And that leads me to my final point, understanding prospect activity. So again, you might have to run training sessions, you might even have to sort of run exercises just to walk through that process. So from a a visitor to prospect to lead to, obviously, then the conversion part. I wanted to sort of extend my thanks to all of the, sponsors and organizers, and I’d also like to thank everyone’s time within this call. Yeah. Thank you for your time.

Speaker 0: Thank you so much, Chris. It was an amazing session, and looks like we are out of time for Q and A discussion. But if you have any questions, we saw a few questions come in chat. Please do reach out to Chris on event chat directly. He’d be happy to take some of them. And thanks again for joining us. Special shout-out to our sponsors for their support, without which, MarDreamin’ wouldn’t have been possible. Make sure to pop in on the sponsor’s booth at some point during the event. And, we have some great sessions coming up in a few minutes over here. You can also head towards the agenda tab and check out full list of sessions that are happening today. Again, thanks a lot, Chris, for your wonderful insights on scoring rules and Marketing Cloud Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Thank you.

Speaker 1: Thank you.