One or several lead scoring models?

[Carla_Cabaceir1]

We have several Business Areas (BA) and one global lead-scoring model.

Will it make sense to create a model for each Business Area or keep the global model and update the score for each BA at a program level?

Thank you,

Carla

[Darshil_Shah1]

Well, this is a strategy question and the answer to this depends more or less on the following - 

 - How decentralized your marketing efforts and qualified lead processes for the BUs are? If your marketing efforts MQL process are quite decentralized and different for each BU (or will be in the future) then it would make sense to have separate scoring fields and setup to update those so that you’re able to distinguish well the propensity of prospects to buy distinctively for each BU. Additionally, this will also allow you to route qualified people to the correct sales team, in case you have a separate sales team for each BU. 

- If you have separate workspaces for BUs, then you’d not be able to reference assets in your central scoring campaigns.

You already have a global scoring setup in place, are there any challenges you’re facing with it that make you think about setting scoring for each BU separately?

[Carla_Cabaceir1]

Thank you @Darshil_Shah1 

We use the CRM routing rules to assign the lead based on their BU; they are all in the same workspace. Good point on the MQL process; currently not different for each BU, and they can send hot leads to Sales right away with an automated process we build, ignoring the scoring. It's worth reviewing their MQL process needs in more detail.

 No major differences in the interest score, and so far, we have been able to make small tweaks that apply to all BUs,  some friction on the Job role and Verticals; thus me thinking of just making changes at a program level for each BU, thinking if the Job role is X, apply +10 to the interest score. My challenge in creating a scoring model for each BU is that we have so many BUs, and creating/maintaining it will take effort, and the outcome will make a small difference.

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

I'd advise to refrain from creating a separate scoring setup for each BU unless it's absolutely necessary, as the extra effort of creating and maintaining separate scoring models wouldn't be worth it (as you said). If you could explain the issue that you're facing w.r.t. Job Role/Verticals in a bit of detail, then we can help with our suggestions/thoughts on how to best accommodate it in your global scoring model itself. But overall, given that your organization shares process/sales agents/workspace for all the BUs, it appears that you should be better off with a single scoring model instead of breaking it out into individual ones for each BU.

[tstevensTrane]

Absolutely agree with keeping a single scoring model in your circumstance. If the differences would be small, I would encourage working with the business units (sales teams) to have them align to the central process (versus building out several custom models that are not sustainable to upkeep). I always encourage to have marketing/sales process to change with the technology, not 'change the technology to fit the sales/marketing team'.

[Michael_Florin]

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Will it make sense to create a model for each Business Area or keep the global model and update the score for each BA at a program level?

From my experience there is no way around that. I've worked in this environment a couple of times, and we had always set up a ProductA-Score, a ProductB-Score plus a ProductA-MQL and a ProductB-MQL stage. Also, you might have a ProductA-Customer who happens to be a ProductB-Prospect. 

As you said, these different products scoring models assign different point values to different data points and their MQL threshold might also be different. You will have to treat these scoring models as independent programs with their own scoring Smart Campaigns. Exact naming for programs or a field that assigns Product Line Membership are important.

Couple of caveats and thoughts: 

• Marketo's standard "Person Score" field becomes useless. Unfortunately it governs MSI's stars and flames, so these won't be usably in a multi-product scoring approach.
• If you have multiple products - I worked with 12 and I'm about to work with 17 right now - the number of score fields will explode quickly. ProductA Demographic Score, ProductA Behavioral Score and ProductA Total Score are too much. Drop Demo and Behavior Score as independent scoring fields and just use "ProductA Score".
• Set up your scoring programs with tokens only! This will enable to quickly onboard new scoring programs through program cloning.

[udaysharma_RP]

Well, you can opt for mix approach. You can keep the Demographic/Frimographic scoring fields in the Global Scoring model (because this will be the same for all BAs) and then after that for Behavior and BA-specific scoring segregate the leads on the basis of different BAs and create separate scoring programs for that. You also, need logic to reset the scoring when a Demographic change happens on a lead. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

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Well, you can opt for mix approach. You can keep the Demographic/Frimographic scoring fields in the Global Scoring model (because this will be the same for all BAs)

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To be clear for lurkers, I assume you mean the fields can be the same and the high-level scoring model may be similar, not that the scoring classifications that populate the fields are the same across BAs.