During our Public Office Hour, Senior Consultants Lindsay Khan, Ashley Gordon, and Caryl Mostacho were asked about the current best practices for setting up lead scoring in Marketo. Lead scoring is a shared sales and marketing process for identifying the hottest leads for future sales, based on qualities you define as success indicators. Many companies struggle with lead scoring, but it’s wise to get the most out of your Marketo and CRM integration and scoring increases your sales team’s efficiency and effectiveness. It’s an important aspect of sales and marketing automation strategies.
Lead Scoring in Marketo
Caryl explains that this is often one of the first and most important questions new clients ask and all three consultants agreed that it was fun. She says that new clients are right to be eager to begin scoring each new subscriber as soon as they engage with content. However, she cautions that lead scoring should be as centralized and as consolidated as possible. It should be its own dedicated program, and she recommends leveraging myTokens, which allows you to easily change the value of each variable as you go, to keep your program flexible and responsive to real users.
Marketo offers a best practice program that can be downloaded and applied to your first Marketo instance, which will give you a feel for how this is set up and Ashley recommends this as a good starting point for users who are unfamiliar with how lead scoring works. Also, in the Marketo community, there are implementation resources, guides and tons of advice for things you can score, including demographics brought in from other databases via web hooks, or based on user behavior and specific engagement patterns that you recognize or are alerted to in analytics. The Marketo resources include a Lead Scoring Cheat Sheet, The Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring, The Big List of Lead Scoring Rules and also The Who, What, Why, How of Lead Scoring. Spend some time exploring these resource materials for a better understanding of how lead scoring in Marketo works and how you can optimize Tokens for more effective scoring.
Caryl advises users to periodically review the tokens that you’ve put into place and make sure that the sales team is involved in the conversation, since they’re the ones using the score. Don’t be afraid to make changes based on what you’re learning about your users.