Lead Scoring and Grading for Sales Wins with Pardot

With inputs from Shantesh Akerkar, Principal Solution Engineer

When it comes to winning (or losing) new business prospects, time is of the essence. Strike while the iron is hot, and you can turn leads into paying customers by –

• contacting them when they have a certain level of awareness about your brand
• promptly responding when they reach out to you
• grabbing their attention when they are very close to making a purchase

This means your business – big or small – cannot afford to waste time and effort on leads that are unlikely to convert while your competitors win over quality leads.

Qualify more leads better with Salesforce lead scoring and grading

Visibility into a lead’s likeliness to convert empowers your sales and marketing teams to decide how much time and energy they should invest in one lead versus another. Your teams can then use the resources they save to build better relationships with high-potential leads as well as widen their pool of prospects.

Salesforce Pardot is a feature-rich solution that can improve your teams’ productivity and efficiency with its lead scoring and grading capabilities.

For lead scoring, teams can use Pardot to automatically assign numeric scores to inbound leads, based on different variables of consumer activity, such as:

• time spent on a product page
• visits to the pricing page
• downloading marketing collaterals
• requesting a demo
• asking for more information

This score indicates how actively interested the leads are in your product or service. Automation removes the need for manual analysis of each interaction with a lead. All you need to do is identify and add the parameters against which you want the leads to be assessed. And the best leads will be filtered for you to pick up immediately.

But only assigning a score is not enough, because not all prospects who demonstrate an interest in your product are necessarily going to find any value in it. So while scoring may inform your teams of a prospect’s intent to purchase, lead grading helps them identify how similar a lead is to the ideal buyer profile of a product or solution, without needing any additional input from the prospect. Pardot allows you to assign grades to leads from A to F depending on:

• demographic
• digital behaviour
• industrial background
• company size
• business feasibility
• customer profile
• interactive behaviour

Once leads are scored and graded, your teams then need to decide which ones to prioritise. There are four broad situations which may arise.

1. High score, high grade – This is the ideal situation wherein the high score shows that the lead is interested in your offerings, and the high grade means this lead is also a suitable match to your ideal customer type.
2. High score, low grade– Leads like these may be highly interested in your products or services but are not the right fit for your business. Such leads are typically interested in other aspects of your business, like careers.
3. Low score, high grade– A lead that may have just entered your sales funnel needs nurturing before they can be sold to. A high grade means the lead matches your business’s requirements but would need to be nurtured to become sales-ready.
4. Low score, low grade– These leads are neither interested in your brand nor a good match for what you’re offering, and can comfortably be removed from your database. While this may change, converting them at this point would usually require more effort than its worth.

Pardot’s lead scoring and grading capabilities benefit your teams in a variety of ways:

• Sales and marketing alignment: It standardises lead scoring and grading processes, helping both teams agree and collaborate on how leads are qualified.

• More revenue: Focusing on high-quality leads means your teams can sell more, faster, by closing bigger deals and up-or cross-selling opportunities.

• Better attribution:By studying where leads come from, it helps your team identify which channels and campaigns lead to conversions, which can help with making more realistic pipeline forecasts and better allocate ad spends.

• Improved interactions with prospects: Pardot lead scoring and grading help in gathering and analysing data to categorise leads based on the parameters and factors that you set. This helps in determining the next course of interaction with prospects.

To know more about how Pardot can empower your sales and marketing teams to spend time on the right activities, click here.