Lead scoring & quality of MQLs passed to CRM

[Anonymous]

We're starting to scope out lead scoring in Marketo, and have began putting scores against different behaviours. For an MQL to be good enough quality for our Sales team, we have 6 required datapoints: first name, last name, company name, email, country and phone number.

How can we incorporate this into our lead scoring model, so that only those who have values for all of the above are passed across, or actually reach the MQL threshold score in the first place? They could meet score of 100 (eg) through their behaviour, but we won't have all of those datapoints. They should only become an MQL with those 6 fields - how can we stop them reaching the score of 100/would we want to do it this way?

Thoughts greatly appreciated.

[Anonymous]

Hi Carly!

I would recommend splitting out your lead score into Behavior Score and Demographic score. The behavior score would would be controlled by all those behaviors you have been setting up scores for, and your demographic score would be controlled by the first name, last name, company name, email, country, and phone number fields that you require.

At all times your Lead Score field should equal the Behavior Score field + the Demographic score field. So, when you add +10 points for a form fill (for example) to the Behavior Score, you will do the same thing to the Lead Score field. You will do this for all your behavior scoring campaigns as well as your demographic scoring campaigns. 

Furthermore, the total weight of your Behavior Score should never exceed 50% of your total lead scoring threshold - i.e. the point at which a lead becomes an MQL. Likewise, your Demographic score should never exceed 50% of the total lead score. In the case above you mention, your MQL threshold is 100 point, therefore both your behavior score and your demographic score should each have their own thresholds of 50 points each.

With demographic scores, this is pretty easy to do, just make sure that when someone meets the requirements for all 6 of your fields, the most they can receive is 50 points. You may want to weights the fields so that some fields are worth more points than others. But the main idea here is that the most points they can get is 50 from the demographic fields alone.

For behavior scores, it a little more complicated. A lead can visit 100 webpages and rack up a score pretty quickly. So for behavior score, I would recommend creating a smart campaign that caps the behavior score at 50. Any time someone behavior score goes above 50 points, move the behavior score back down to 50 points. You will also want to account for the Lead Score field as well, so you will need to add steps for changing the lead score to the demographic score value and then add +50 points to back to the lead score. That way, a lead will have to reach the top demographic score before they can reach the 100 pt threshold and get passed to sales.

I hope this helps!

Chelsea

[Emily_Thornton1]

Carly,

Do you have a separate set of smart campaigns that control your lead scores, and ones that control the movement of leads through RCM/Lead Qualification stages? (If not, it's a good practice.) If this is in place, then you would just need to have in the smart list of your triggered smart campaign that updates the RCM stage: your lead score thresholds, as well as any specific attributes that someone must have populated in order to move forward in the RCM.

[Anonymous]

Hi Emily - we haven't set anything up yet, so no.

So are you suggesting that even if someone hits a behavioural score that would usually trigger an MQL, that we have another set of rules that might stop it from flowing through into our CRM/becoming qualified? Until those 6 fields are filled in?

Thanks

[Emily_Thornton1]

If you require those 6 fields for a record to become an MQL (as you stated in your original post), then yes, they should be criteria in the smart campaign that moves a record into the MQL stage.

[Gerard_Donnell4]

Hi Karly,

I would use a second smart campaign that manages leads that attain a Person/Lead Score of over 100.  This smart campaign will then make sure all the criteria is met before sending it to the MQL queue in your CRM system. See this screen shot below of something similar that I use. This means that you can set up your Demographic and Behavior scoring any way you like.

In the flow steps you can then have fields like:

MQL = True

MQL Timestamp = {{system.date}}

Person/Lead Status = Prospect

Sync Person to Salesforce = -- Use Auto-Assignment Rules -- 

(We set up assignment rules in SF to direct leads to the correct queues based on demographic information such as country etc)

Hope this helps.

[Harish_Gupta6]

Hi Carly,

First, you can set all these as filter step in the smart campaign which is basically changing the leads status to MQL.

Secondly, ask your CRM admin to create a validation rule in Salesforce/Dynamic which will push the leads back to old status eg. Engaged/Enquiry if they would have any of these mandatory field missing. In short, CRM will not accept leads with MQL status if  leads would not have all these mandatory data.

Thanks