When one score isn't enough - consider Interest Scoring

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Scoring in Marketo Engage allows you to build scores for people based on their engagement with your marketing activities and their demographic information. This standard scoring methodology allows sales teams to prioritize follow-up and increase conversion rates.  But what do you do if your company has a diverse product line with different sales routing and processes?  What do you do when one score isn’t enough?  The answer for you might be interest level scoring. 

Interest level scoring lets people flow through a scoring program dedicated to that particular interest so that only demographic criteria and specific activities associated with that interest contribute to the score.

An interest level program flow looks (and works) like this:

• When a person has their first scoring interaction with an interest monitored by the program, they will be added to the program as a member. 
• The person’s demographic score is calculated and added to the interest score associated with the program
• The person continues to interact with assets associated to this interest until they meet the scoring threshold for that interest
• The person is routed to sales
• After a set period of time or another identified trigger, the person is removed from the program and their score is reset; which allows the person to flow through this interest program again. 
  
  

There are 3 key foundational components to consider leveraging when building an interest level scoring program, including:

1. Program statuses: Create a specific channel and program statuses to help manage the flow through the program.  These are also a great way to quickly identify and report on the records in your lead funnel.  Examples of program statuses to support the above flow are score, score and demographic, and threshold met.
2. Field requirements:  Each interest score requires its own scoring field so that each one can be managed separately.  It’s also very nice to have a threshold met date for each score that records the last time the person was passed to sales for a specific interest.
3. Naming convention requirements: For the scoring smart campaigns to know what behaviors to process, it’s important to have an interest indicator in the naming convention of your program.  This should be a short, unique code that does not contain a common sequence of characters, so it doesn’t accidentally trigger multiple scoring campaigns. 

There are certainly more set-up and maintenance requirements for a model like this, but for companies that have a wide product or service offering with different routing requirements, moving to an interest-based scoring model is worth considering.