Optimising Sales Processes With Pardot Scoring

This blog was written before Pardot was renamed to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. You can read more about the name change and what it means here.

Marketing and sales alignment has to be one of the highest priorities if a business wants to deliver better results. When both departments are working synergistically it can have a massive impact on marketing ROI, sales productivity and top-line growth. With marketing automation and particularly Pardot scoring, you’ll be able to optimise all areas of the marketing-sales relationship.

One area that is under constant scrutiny from sales is lead quality and relevance. It isn’t rare to see leads passed to a salesperson based in the wrong area or to someone who might not have the knowledge or experience to deal with the enquiry.

By automating this whole process using Pardot scoring, you’ll eradicate lead assignment problems and sales won’t be able to question the quality of leads.

Here’s an example…

The Scenario

You run a successful commercial finance brokerage and you have Senior and Junior BDM’s based in several locations across the UK. The Junior team takes care of all the smaller clients and the Senior BDM’s look after the higher value sales. Currently, sales are being sent leads that either aren’t relevant to their experience level or based on the other side of the country. This is costing them time and causing friction between marketing and sales.

The Problem

Your marketing team are running campaigns and they’re sending plenty of leads to sales. The issue is that lead assignment is currently a manual process where the team have to look at an excel spreadsheet to see what BDM covers what area and if they are experienced enough to handle the bigger deals - not the most efficient operation by any means.

The Solution

“Here’s something I made earlier”

The above diagram is a simple way to illustrate how this problem can be overcome.

Let me walk you through it.

1. The marketing team are continuing their multichannel approach and are driving traffic towards the different financial products that you offer.
   
2. Through engaging with your product pages and completing the forms on your website, the prospects start accruing more than 100 points which is your signal that they are an active prospect and should be passed to sales.
3. As they’ve previously filled out forms (that you made sure asked for their location) you can start segmenting people based on the particular product they are interested in alongside their geographical location. This helps determine which sales team they will be sent to.
4. You’ve set up profiling rules that look at the information they’ve given us to decide a grade. Anyone above a C’ grade needs to be sent to your more experienced salespeople in the right location, as that’s where the big money is!

Using Pardot scoring and automation in this way ensures that your salespeople are receiving the right market qualified leads each and every time, saving them time and further aligning the two teams. The insight they’ll have will be game-changing as they can see the content that they looked at and subsequently downloaded, how often they visited the site and what led them to become a qualified lead. They’ll appreciate how fast they were sent the lead too.

Above is just an example of how you could be using automation and Pardot scoring but obviously, this will change depending on how your business is set up. Fortunately, MA platforms are incredibly powerful and there is always more than one way to achieve the same goal.

For more expert guidance and tips on Pardot scoring for marketing and sales processes, download the free B2B Marketer's Handbook: Pardot Scoring & Grading That Works.