Best practices on treating “target list” in terms of scoring, list setup, and life-cycle setup

[Eunice_Leung]

We are new to Marketo. I would like to hear the best practices on treating “target list” in terms of scoring, list setup, and life-cycle setup.

We receive lists of prospect names from time to time from our media partners.  Most of the names are added to Marketo for further nurture, but there are some who fit our target company or individual profile. These are the names whom our Product Marketers want to push over for our Business Development team. We just started using Marketo and we have only activated behavior scoring. The qualifying behavior score for a lead to advance to MQL (the lifecycle stage of a Business-Development-ready lead) is 50.

Should I score them to the qualifying score for data sanity despite that their activity level is below qualification?

Should I build a Program for this type of leads so I can track them down the path?

Should I set their lifecycle to MQL?

Thank you,

Eunice

[Kelly_Schmid3]

Hi Eunice!

There are a few different ways you can handle these. We handle leads coming from Tradeshows similarly. Some of the leads coming in are simply leads to drop into our nurture program while others need to be followed up with immediately. What you can do is create separate program statuses for these and score based on those. If a lead is imported with the status to be followed upon, you can either score those high enough to push them over the threshold OR you can have a fast track set up in your lead lifecycle to automatically push to MQL when someone is imported with that status.

Thanks,
Kelly

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hi Eunice,

Your question "Should I score them to the qualifying score for data sanity despite that their activity level is below qualification" is basically like demographic scoring. You aren't giving them points because of their behaviors, but instead because of their traits -- and this is perfectly acceptable! So yes, I would say that you should incorporate behavioral and demographic scoring into your model. You can find instructions on this in any search for setting up behavioral and demographic scoring. There's also this from a Marketo employee Why We Only Score Demographics Once

I would also advise building a program, ideally with a channel for your media partners. For this, I would advise reading up on channel best practices

Channel Best Practices

Channel / Program Status Best Practices - Part 2

And finally, yes. If you're advancing their score to Business-Development-ready, then you should be moving them to a status of MQL as well.