Pardot Scoring and Grading - it's set up what do I do now?
Disclaimer: Pardot has been renamed by Salesforce as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE), for this blog I will be referring to the product as Pardot,.
If like me and numerous other Pardot users you think the rebranding was poorly thought out and the new name to be confusing, please add your vote to this idea in the Salesforce Ideas Exchange.
After I attended a Scoring and Grading in Pardot webinar last week, the link to which can be found at the end of this blog, it spurred me to pull a report for a couple of my clients looking at closed won opportunities and the respective Pardot score and grade of the associated Contact to check that the scoring and grading was on point to the reality of who we were closing business with.
Here’s the how-to on pulling this report;
Navigate to Salesforce Reports
Create a new report using the report type ‘Contacts with Opportunities’ This is a custom report type that needs to be set up by your Salesforce admin or you if you have the permissions. To set up go to Report Types, select ‘New Custom report’ select A. Primary Object as Contact and B. As Opportunities, ensuring that for the A and B relationship Each "A" record must have at least one related "B" record
Filter the report to include All Contacts, Opportunity stage Closed Won and the date range you want to look at. Something to consider when looking at a date range is any automation you have in Pardot to degrade a score based on inactivity could impact the score shown on the Contact record.
Add the columns that you would like to show, ensure you include Account Engagement Grade and Account Engagement Score, and group by these rows, add any other columns for fields you want to see data for, you may find Amount, Industry and Country useful.
Run the report.
Once you are happy with the report format, save the report in a Folder accessible to both Marketing and Sales as the report will drive business discussions between the two departments.
Interpreting the Report results - Scoring
The report will show you an overview of scores you can use this as an overview to ascertain whether you scoring is at the right threshold.
Spot-check a few Contact records to see the journey they took to Opportunity to understand whether scores are associated correctly. You can reference the Engagement History component on their Contact record or look at their Prospect record in Pardot, I find the latter easier.
I.e. if the journey to opportunity is mainly form/form handler driven then applying scoring on emails should be minimised. It is also worth considering that as email opens are no longer a reliable email metric any scoring assigned to email opens should be amended to 0.
Interpreting the Report results - Grading
If your report is showing Contacts with the majority A Grades then B Grades that's great, no Grade tweaking is needed.
If your report is showing people with Grade D are the majority then you should look at the profile grading and amend. Perhaps you have prospects matching to Country United Kingdom as a match which you are applying a full grade to and Prospects matching to Country France as a match which you are applying ⅔ of a Grade to yet your Closed Won Opportunities report for the last quarter is showing the majority of the Opportunities are associated to Contacts with Country France.
Industry may be another field which you using in your grading set up. Perhaps you are currently assigning a full grade to Prospects in the Transport industry but your report shows that over the last quarter the Opportunities Won have been for Prospects in the Construction industry, yet your grading set up is applying a ⅓ of a grade for this industry.
Something additional to note on grading is that Leads can enter Pardot through your CRM system sync. Using Salesforce as an example, any Leads orientating from Salesforce either through manual entry or API connection, say from social media, should be entered ensuring that the fields being used for grading in Pardot are populated on Lead creation as then once they sync to Pardot they can be graded according to the data in those fields. This helps ensure prospects through all lead sources are graded the same.
I would recommend reviewing Scoring and Grading once a quarter, and meet with Sales to review and discuss possible tweaks that could be made.
Scoring and Grading set up in Pardot takes thought and time to set up, so if you are going to invest time and effort you should check back on your work at regular intervals to check that its still relevant to your business - always strive to learn and improve.
Check out the webinar - Let's build scoring and grading in Account Engagement (Pardot)
I’m Jen, a x3 certified Salesforce professional with a passion for Marketing Automation. I hope you enjoyed this blog.
If you are interested in my Salesforce and/or Pardot (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) services click on the Contact button, I work with clients around the world across a number of industries and always happy to provide Salesforce and Marketing support you can also find me on LinkedIn.
