Elevate Your Lead Scoring Practices With Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

In the cutthroat world of modern business, it’s not enough to simply generate leads; you need to prioritize those that are most likely to convert. Traditional methods like Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline (BANT), while useful in the past, often fall short in today’s data-driven world.

To truly prioritize prospects based on their likelihood to convert, and to enable sales and marketing teams to focus on nurturing high-quality leads, you need a more advanced approach. 

This is where Pardot—now called Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE)—comes in. Its automated lead scoring system streamlines the process, improves accuracy, and enhances sales productivity.

In this post, we’ll dive into how you can leverage Pardot to create a tailored lead scoring model that helps you zero in on high-potential leads and supercharge your conversion rates.

Ready to transform your lead qualification process? Let’s explore the power of intelligent lead scoring with Pardot.

What is the Pardot Lead Scoring System? How Does It Work?

Pardot score is a numerical value based on the number of interactions a prospective customer makes with your business. These interactions include email opens, form submissions, website visits, filling out a form, downloading content, and attending webinars or events hosted by your company. Here are the top 5 strategies for optimizing your Pardot lead scoring approach.

Pardot Scoring

Pardot evaluates leads using two primary metrics: score and grade. The score is the numerical value assigned based on the prospect’s level of engagement and interactions with your brand. This provides a quantitative measure of how interested and engaged a prospect is with your products. Following are the two scoring approaches Pardot offers:

a. Default Scoring

Pardot has built-in scoring rules that automatically apply based on common actions like website visits or form submissions. For example, visiting a webpage may earn a prospect 1 point, while submitting a form could be worth 50 points.

b. Customized Scoring

Pardot’s scoring system can be fully customized to suit your company’s specific needs. You can adjust point values for key actions, prioritize high-value pages (like pricing pages), or create automation rules to transition prospects from MQLs to SQLs. Custom scoring also allows companies with multiple product lines to use scoring categories to assess prospects’ interest in different offerings, enabling more targeted follow-up actions.

Pardot Grading

While a high score indicates interest, it doesn’t always mean the lead is a good fit. Pardot’s grading system helps address this by assigning a letter grade (A to F) based on how closely a prospect aligns with your ideal customer profile. Grading criteria can include factors like job title, budget, and geographic location.

Pardot Grading Profiles let you set up multiple customer personas, allowing you to assign grades that reflect how well each prospect fits a specific profile. This helps your sales team focus on qualified prospects, preventing them from chasing leads that may have a high score but are not actually a good match for your business.

The Blended Approach

Pardot’s combined scoring and grading system allows businesses to evaluate prospects based on both interest (score) and fit (grade). This approach helps identify which leads are truly sales-ready:

• High Score, High Grade: These are hot leads, highly engaged, and a perfect fit for your business. You can prioritize these prospects.
• High Score, Low Grade: These leads are interested but may not be a good fit for your product. You can nurture them for brand awareness but prioritizing them is not recommended.
• Low Score, High Grade: These prospects fit your target market but need more nurturing before they’re ready to buy. These are MQLs that should be prioritized for marketing efforts.
• Low Score, Low Grade: These leads are unlikely to convert and can be disqualified from further outreach.

Weighted Lead Scoring and Grading

Pardot’s weighted system ensures flexibility in identifying qualified leads. For example, a lead with a low score but a high grade can still be considered sales-ready if they meet other important criteria. Conversely, a lead with a lower grade but high engagement might still qualify based on their level of interest. This weighted approach gives businesses a more nuanced view of lead quality, balancing both engagement and customer fit.

Score Decay

Lead engagement can diminish over time, and Pardot’s score decay feature accounts for this. It automatically lowers a lead’s score if they’ve been inactive for a specified period, helping businesses avoid wasting resources on prospects that have lost interest. Automation rules can be set to reduce scores after periods of inactivity and even tag leads for easy re-engagement later. This helps ensure that only active, engaged leads remain prioritized for follow-up.

How Can Pardot Lead Scoring System Help Your Business?

Improved Lead Qualification

Pardot’s scoring system automatically assigns points to prospects based on their interactions with your marketing materials, such as website visits, form submissions, and email clicks. This ensures that your sales team focuses on leads that have shown real interest and engagement, improving the chances of conversion.

Customized Scoring for Better Accuracy

With Pardot, you can tailor the scoring system to fit your business’s unique needs. You can prioritize certain actions, like visiting a pricing page or downloading a specific asset, by assigning higher scores to these behaviors. This flexibility ensures that leads are scored based on the most meaningful actions for your business.

Seamless Integration with Salesforce

Pardot integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, ensuring that your sales team has real-time visibility into lead scores. This allows for immediate follow-up on high-scoring leads, improving responsiveness and overall lead conversion rates.

Enhanced Lead Nurturing

Leads that aren’t ready to buy can be automatically placed into nurturing campaigns based on their score. Pardot’s scoring system helps segment these leads and ensures they receive relevant content until they are sales-ready. This reduces manual effort and keeps leads engaged over time.

Balanced Lead Evaluation with Scoring & Grading

Pardot’s combined lead scoring and grading system ensures that your team not only targets prospects who are interested but also those who are a good fit for your business. This prevents time from being wasted on low-quality leads, allowing your team to focus on leads with a higher chance of closing.

Predictive Analytics for Better Decision-Making

Pardot’s AI-powered tools, like Einstein AI, provide predictive lead scoring insights. This feature helps businesses prioritize leads more accurately, reducing guesswork and enabling data-driven decisions.

How to Enhance & Optimize Pardot Lead Scoring Capabilities?

Carefully Select Key Criteria

To avoid inflated scores and ensure an accurate reflection of a lead’s interest, carefully choose the attributes that factor into your lead scoring. The effectiveness of your scoring system depends heavily on how well these criteria align with your business goals. Assign higher points to key actions, like visiting pricing pages or completing web forms, which indicate strong buying intent. Tailor the scoring system to reflect high-value activities that are most relevant to your product and target audience.

Define a Clear Buyer Persona

Establishing a detailed buyer persona is critical for effective lead scoring. Understanding who your ideal customer is and their buying journey helps you identify leads that are a strong fit. Gather important data such as job title, industry, budget, and location, then assign appropriate scores based on how closely prospects match this profile. Behavioral data like email engagement, demo requests, and social media interactions can also provide valuable insights to refine your scoring system.

Set a Scoring Threshold

A well-defined scoring threshold ensures leads are only handed over to sales once they are fully qualified. This threshold acts as a clear indicator that a prospect is ready for engagement, helping sales teams focus on leads that are most likely to convert. Defining this boundary streamlines the process, reduces ambiguity, and prioritizes high-potential leads.

Incorporate Score Decay

To prevent scores from becoming inflated due to inactivity, introduce a negative scoring or score degradation system. Set criteria that reduce points when leads stop engaging with your brand over a defined period. This automated score decay ensures that disengaged or unfit prospects don’t clutter the pipeline, maintaining an accurate and up-to-date lead pool.

Track Conversion Rates

Measure the effectiveness of your lead scoring system by monitoring conversion rates. Analyze whether leads that meet your scoring criteria are successfully converting into customers. This ongoing review helps ensure your scoring system aligns with real-world results, allowing you to make data-driven adjustments and improvements.

Regularly Update the Scoring Model

Lead scoring is not a set-it-and-forget-it process. Regularly review and adjust your scoring model to keep it aligned with your evolving business goals and market trends. Continuous evaluation helps fine-tune the system, ensuring it remains effective and relevant in capturing the most promising leads.

How to Assess the Effectiveness of Your Lead Scoring Model?

Different Scores = Different Conversion Rates

Your scoring model should accurately reflect lead behavior by assessing whether leads with different scores convert at different rates. Leads in higher-scoring quadrants should exhibit stronger conversion behavior, and if this pattern is not clear, your scoring model may need reassessment.

High-Quality Leads Should Grow Over Time

A successful scoring system should increase the number of high-quality leads over time. Regularly analyze your top-performing leads to identify patterns, channels, and qualities that drive conversions. This will enable more effective alignment between marketing and sales teams to consistently attract ideal prospects.

Velocity is Key

Lead velocity—how quickly leads move through the sales funnel, is crucial. A well-tuned scoring model should decrease time-to-close by helping sales teams quickly identify high-intent leads. Continuously monitor the speed of conversion to ensure that the highest-rated leads also close the fastest.

Measure Value, Not Just Conversions

It’s important to measure the value of leads alongside their conversion rates. High-scoring leads should not only convert more often but also bring higher value deals, such as larger contracts or longer retention periods. Understanding lead value will help tailor your sales strategy and increase overall revenue.

Focus on Conversion, Velocity, Value, and Volume

A great scoring model will positively impact all four key metrics—conversion, velocity, value, and volume. Start by optimizing one metric at a time, then gradually improve others. As these metrics improve simultaneously, your lead scoring model will drive significant business growth. A/B testing scoring models can help refine this process effectively.

Key Takeaway

Lead scoring is, therefore, an essential practice for businesses to prioritize leads, and avoid wasting time on unqualified leads, resulting in higher revenue and better resource allocation.

However, to stay ahead in today’s competitive landscape, simply attracting leads isn’t enough—you need to ensure you’re focusing on the right ones. 

By leveraging the advanced lead scoring capabilities of Pardot Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE), you can prioritize high-quality leads, improve alignment between marketing and sales, and significantly boost conversions. 

With a personalized and strategic lead scoring model, you’ll be equipped to drive revenue growth and set your business up for long-term success.

Need Help Optimizing Your Pardot Lead Scoring System? Talk to Us!