Hi Jason,
Really good response from Stijn Heijthuijsen above, but since you said you're new to Marketo I wanted to provide a bit more detail:
Lead score can be calculated by behavior (+1 point for visiting a web page, +25 points for downloading a report, whatever), or by a combination of behavior and demographic (e.g. +10 points for a valid email address that does not contain @gmail.com, -10 points for an undesirable/junior job title, etc). In order to do the combination type scoring, I've always kept 2 separate fields for "behavior score" and "demographic score" and then returned the sum of these two values in the "lead score" field. However you end up doing this, the lead score is really just about putting a numeric value on any factors that you think may influence eventual buying behavior. You may find that you need to adjust these over time - that's normal, it just means you're learning more about what activities are most indicative of a good prospect. It's also worth keeping in mind that the order in which events occur may be an important factor. Examples:
- Behavior score: +25 when any report is downloaded
- Demographic score: When a lead is created, +10 if email address does not contain "@hotmail.com"
- Behavior conditional score: If lead A downloads a report, +50 if he has previously downloaded a white paper, but +35 if he has not downloaded a white paper in the past.
A sales insight event is a bit of a different beast because it does not have to be attached to any scoring activity (although many activities that you'll want to attach a score to are also likely candidates for sales insight events. I tend to think of sales insight events as a "highlights reel" of the full lead activity history that you can see in Marketo. A couple of examples here:
a. For a subset of activity type Our sales team doesn't want to see every web page visit for every lead (for us, web page visit earns +1 if it's on our marketing site and +2 for certain pages within our documentation), but they do want to see visits to our pricing page, so I send a sales insight event for a visit to /pricing/
b. Activity type with additional information I assign a score of +50 for downloading any report, and a score of +25 for downloading a datasheet. But to provide more information in sales insights, I send an event for "downloaded content - [name of document], so that sales reps can see which specific report or datasheet each lead has accessed.
c. Non-digital activity When our team goes to a tradeshow, we assign the Program Status "visited booth" to anyone we scan at the event, which has a corresponding behavior score value of +150. However, I also send a custom sales insight milestone for anyone we scanned, structured as "visited booth at [event name MM.YYYY].
If you're just getting started, my recommendation is to get your behavioral scoring set up first, then to use that information as a guide for what you may want to make sales insight events for. And definitely don't be afraid to get some input from your sales team (specifically from SDRs), as they'll likely have very good suggestions for what they want to see.
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