Foundational Marketo User Group: Score Smarter, Not Harder

Transcript

All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the foundations of Arquette-O-Engage, Arquette-O User Group. We are in our fourth of five sessions. We have two great speakers today. My name is Brad Bedford. I’ve been your host for the last few, introducing all of our knowledgeable speakers from the last three sessions. And up today, we have Chris Kelly and Jeremy Evans. We’ll introduce fully in a few minutes. But I have a little bit of housekeeping slides that I will just go over as we start all of our User Group meetings that are recorded. As you can see here, this user group is recorded. So it is a virtual version, so I don’t have to worry too much about being on camera. But if there’s anything that you don’t feel comfortable with, you can definitely watch the recording back after that is posted probably later this week. If you don’t want to be recorded for any reason, this is a perfect opportunity for you to come back next time. So no worries. And our next thing is all about staying connected with our Arquette-O foundational User Group chapter. I will post that link directly in the chat here in a few minutes. I feel like you’re… Of course. I will post this link for the foundational User Group here so you can join this chapter and stay up to date on all of our meetings. As I mentioned, the fourth of our five-part series, we will have one more of these. It’s all about preparing you for taking the professional exam. And today is about schooling. So super awesome things about that.

Highly recommend the exam.

It’s a good way to get started with Arquette-O for sure. House rules. This is a standard across all of our User Groups. No self-promotion. Do not contact any people outside of the User Group without their consent. And if anyone shares a specific use case, obviously, please keep that information confidential and do not share that out without their consent. So if you want to use somebody as a use case, get in touch with them and coordinate on that for the future. I think we have one final slide. Yes. Adobe Experience Maker Awards. The submission window has just begun. It is open through the 17th of October. Finalists will get two complimentary passes to Adobe Summit, not just one anymore. So that’s an awesome way to backdoor your way into Summit if you haven’t been able to attend in the past. We have a new category here called the Groundbreaker, which is all about increasing personalized experiences. So it’s a great program that we have. It’s a great award night. The gala is absolutely insane. Black Tie event. If you’ve never gotten the opportunity to attend before or known anybody who has been a finalist, highly, highly, highly recommend applying. It only takes a few minutes and the award lasts a lifetime. So go for it. All right. Let’s get into our session today. As I mentioned, we have two incredible speakers. We have Jeremy Evans coming at us live from Sydney. It’s bright and early in the morning on the 16th of September for him. And we have Chris Kelly, who is our three or four time champion now? Three? Four? Three. Three? Three. Three time champion coming at us live out of Iowa for the qualifying digital team. So thank you so much, both of you, for being our speakers today. And I’ll let you guys kick it off with the agenda.

Perfect. Thank you very much, Brad. So I’ll kick things off with the agenda in terms of what will be coming today. So we’ll start by looking at some of the challenges marketers often face when it comes to lead management so that we can set the context for what scoring is and why it matters. From there, we’ll give a definition of scoring and walk through the benefits that it brings both to marketing and sales alignment and to improving conversion rates. Next, we’ll look at the different types of scoring and how you can build a strategy that fits your business goals. From there, once we’ve set the foundation, we’ll show how interesting moments fit into the picture. And then we’ll walk through some example scoring models to make it all a bit more tangible. So we’ll cover some basic sort of B2B scoring models, but also talk to some B2C scoring models as well. And finally, we’ll share any tips and key takeaways that you can apply right away. And then we’ll leave some time at the end for any Q&A so that we can answer your questions. In saying that, we’ve got the chat going. We’ll be taking a look at it as will Brad. So feel free to pop any burning questions in there as well. Also, if we’ve got some time, I’ve got a demo environment of Marketo up on my other screen. So happy to jump in and sort of show a bit more of the role in action. But with that, let me kick things off with understanding what the key challenges are that, or where scoring comes into the fold to help address. So one of the biggest challenges organizations face today is that marketing automation tools, and in fact pretty much any martech platform, they generate massive amounts of data. So we’re talking about everything from web visits, form fills, email interactions, to signals coming from social media, paid campaigns, chat engagement, and even product usage and purchase activity. The problem isn’t a lack of data, but the real challenge is making sense of it. So with so many touch points, it becomes incredibly difficult to identify who is genuinely interested in speaking with your company, who is simply browsing, and who might actually be ready to make a purchase decision. Without a structured way of interpreting all those signals, two things happen. Sales waste time chasing the wrong people, leading to frustration and missed opportunities, and marketing struggles to prove impact because it can’t easily demonstrate which activities are driving real pipeline. And let’s be honest, manually sifting through every activity log, it’s just not scalable. Imagine trying to review thousands of interactions one by one to figure out who’s worth prioritizing. It’s not possible. So how do you cut through the noise? How do you spot your best prospects in a sea of data and make sure that sales is having the right conversations with the right people at the right time? I’m sure you’ve heard that saying many times before. This is exactly where the concept of scoring comes in. So scoring gives us a framework to turn raw activity into actionable insights, to highlight fit, to surface engagement, and to create a common language between marketing and sales around lead quality. So how is scoring defined? Scoring is a shared sales and marketing methodology for ranking people in order to determine their sales readiness. You score people based on their interest in your products or services and their fit in regards to your business. Interest refers to key buying signals. In other words, activities such as visiting a pricing page on your website, attending a webinar, having a conversation with an agent on your website, and so on. This concept of interest is what we often refer to within Marketo as behavioral scoring, which is signifying who wants to do business with you. Fit for your business refers to who it is you’re trying to target or do business with. For example, if you work for a marketing software company who is trying to target CMOs, you’d likely award these people a higher score or more points as opposed to people who aren’t decision makers. So this type of scoring is what we often refer to within Marketo as demographic scoring. If you’ve used some other automation tools out there before, you may have heard this term being referred to as rank or even grade. By looking at a person’s behavior and characteristics across many attributes and activities, we can more accurately identify top prospects and ensure that we’re routing only the most qualified leads to sales. Sales can then focus on converting those leads to customers rather than wasting time with those people who haven’t yet shown any type of buying signal or even individuals that your company does not want to target. By assigning points that refer to how hot, warm, or cold a person is in terms of interest, your team can identify which person’s sales should try contacting first, which needs more nurturing from marketing, and which should be disqualified on fit, interest, or engagement.

An important reason of why scoring incorporates both behavioral and demographic components is because if someone takes a high value action, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are a high value prospect or someone that you want to be doing business with. The same action can be taken for different reasons and from different people, which should be accounted for. For example, four individuals may fill out a form to download a white paper, but all have different reasons. So one might be a student doing a university project. Another might be an internal employee looking for a white paper who just can’t be bothered finding it in their internal network. Full transparency, I’ve been guilty of that. Another might be a genuine lead who fits within your ideal customer profile or your ICP. And another might be a competitor who is trying to download a white paper to get more insights as to what your business is up to. This is where demographic scoring comes into play. For example, you wouldn’t be wanting to send a lead to sales who is actually an internal employee, which is something that could happen if you relied solely on behavioral scoring. Rather, you’d be wanting to send someone who is an ideal prospect. In this case, you’d want to ensure that people’s demographic attributes are being accounted for when it comes to scoring. Typically, marketing is focused on casting a wide debt, generating a high volume of leads to deliver to the sales team for the lowest cost. And the sales team, on the other hand, can’t typically follow up on every lead that they receive from marketing. They’re focused on leads that are most likely to become customers. Due to this, there has traditionally been a bit of a misalignment between marketing and sales, where marketing would generate that high volume of leads, sometimes without proper qualification, and pass them across to sales in order to follow up on. If sales are following up with leads that aren’t yet ready to have a conversation with them, or even junk leads, like for example, a student researching your company, then this can create friction between the two departments. Scoring is the perfect solution to help bridge this gap and align marketing and sales, so it’s a win-win as we’ll dive into shortly.

So now that we’ve covered how scoring is defined, let’s take a closer look at some of the key benefits that implementing a scoring model can bring. The first few points here I’ve briefly either touched on or alluded to so far, but let’s take a closer look at each one of them. By giving people points based on their interactions with your company, such as visiting key web pages, making purchases, submitting forms, and so on, it helps determine the level of interest that people in your database have with your business and solutions. For example, someone who has been engaging a lot more with your marketing materials would generally have a higher score, thus showing higher buying intent compared to someone who is engaged less and has a lower score. Scoring can also aid you in ranking your leads to see who fits your target customer profile by giving more points to those people in your database who fit your target market. For example, if your organization targets CMOs within the healthcare industry, you want to give these people more points as opposed to, say, a marketing manager in a completely different industry. It allows you to improve marketing and sales productivity and align the two departments, since leads will build up a score to a point where they’re deemed hot or marketing-qualified leads, at which point they’re passed across to sales who know they’re getting qualified hot leads who have a higher chance of converting. We strongly recommend that marketing and sales work together when creating a scoring model so there’s transparency across the entire process, and we’ll elaborate a bit more on this later on today. So this, in turn, often leads to an increase of revenue at a higher velocity, since marketing is no longer sending cold leads to sales, and sales are being much more efficient with their time as they’re focusing on hot leads, which are most likely to convert. Another key benefit is being able to identify where everyone in your database is at in their particular journey. So when you have an active scoring model within your Marketo instance, you’ll more easily be able to get a breakdown of how hot, warm, or cold your database is, and then target these segments or these people accordingly. A common approach is to incorporate a nurturing strategy based on score. So for example, if someone has a score between 0 and 30 points, they may be best served content that is more top of funnel or early stage content, as opposed to those who have a score of say 70 points, which may be better served with bottom of funnel or late stage content, since they’re further along their journey and hopefully closer to making a purchase decision. Another example may be that you want to set up a re-engagement nurture for people who have a score of 0 or close to it. In other words, trying to get them to begin engaging with your marketing materials to build up that score over time.

Leading on from this, it will allow marketing to identify and focus their marketing efforts on your best targets or customers. For example, would a special offer or a very specific piece of content for those warm leads be enough to convert them into hot leads? So now let’s take a closer look at the types of scoring that you can set up within Marketo that would make up a scoring model.

The two most common types of scoring, which we’ve already touched on a little, are demographic and behavioral, which make up an overarching person score. Demographic scoring, helping you identify the characteristics of the person that you want to do business with based on qualification criteria, such as industry or job title, as a couple of common examples. Behaviors show you which people actually want to do business with you based on their interactions, such as chat engagements, downloading white papers and the like. Behaviors like this can and often occur frequently, updating the score with each interaction. Demographics, on the other hand, don’t generally change too often, as it’s not every day that someone is changing job titles, moving companies, moving locations, and so on. So as such, demographic scoring has less of an influence on the overall person score when compared to behavioral scoring. When defining and setting up behavioral scores, in other words, how many points you want to award a person in your database when they complete a particular action, there are a few considerations. You can determine the frequency of the behavioral score. For example, if a prospect visits the pricing page on your website, do you want to score every time this occurs? Just once or maybe even every set number of days or hours. This allows you to be very specific with how a scoring model is working within Marketo, but can also make it a confusing as you might be wondering, well, what frequency is best for every behavior that I’m going to be scoring on? We’ll go through some examples later today. However, a good rule of thumb is to avoid overscoring by limiting rules to a specific number of actions in a given time frame. This avoids a person’s score from overinflating at a rapid rate, which may not be a indicator of their current buying intent. For example, you could look to give a person five points if they visit five web pages in one day, rather than giving them five points every single time that they visit a web page. It’s also worth noting that you can score based on any activity which Marketo captures. Email, web, chat, webinar, social media, just to name a few. Additionally, if you’re using custom activities or bringing in activity data to Marketo from another platform, you can absolutely score on this too. When it comes to demographic scoring, the attribute that you choose to score on will depend on your individual business and your target market. If you are targeting CMOs, then perhaps you want to award 20 points compared to a head of marketing who is still important, but maybe not as big of a decision maker. So you might give them 10 points. We do recommend working alongside sales when coming up with your entire scoring model. And we’ll talk through this in more detail soon. However, it’s critical that they’re involved, especially in the demographic component, to help determine values, weight, and rank. You can score on any attribute or data point within Marketo. Common examples include things like company, industry, company size, but these are really scratching the surface. If you’re syncing Marketo with your CRM, your data warehouse, CDP, or any other platform like I mentioned before, you can score on these data points as well. But we’ll dive into some more examples a little bit later today to give you an idea of what are some other demographic attributes that I might want to score on.

So far, we’ve spoken about giving points to people based on behaviors and demographic attributes. However, if we were to continue scoring or awarding people points indefinitely, their score would never stop growing and some problems could arise. And this is where the concept of negative scoring comes into play. So negative scoring reduces the total score for a person in the database when behavioral or demographic information indicates that the person is not interested in your products or services. So generally, there are three types of negative scoring. The first type is a one-time score reduction, which reduces a person’s score for a specific behavior or attribute update. Some common examples here include reducing a person’s score for opting out of marketing emails, although shortly we’ll touch on another approach you can take with these particular people who opt out entirely, and also reducing a person’s score for visiting an undesirable page multiple times in a given period. So the example on my screen here refers to someone who is visiting the careers page on your website multiple times in a week, which may indicate that that individual is more interested in coming to work for you as an employee as opposed to becoming a customer. So the second type of negative scoring is what we call score decay, which reduces a person’s score repetitively over time due to inactivity.

An example of score decay would be subtracting points from a person’s total score for every month that they don’t engage with any email or web content. Score decay helps ensure that a person’s score reflects current interest rather than just behavior and prevents old activity from keeping someone at say a hot lead status forever. The third type of negative scoring is a complete score reset. This resets a person’s score to zero based on specific behavior that you can define, and it’s commonly used if you’re wanting to set a person’s score back to zero after they make a retest. Another example is ensuring that your employees and partners don’t accumulate scoring points. You may want to reset their score or set their score to be zero. However, you may even look to exclude employees, partners, or even competitors entirely from your scoring model so that they’re not even receiving points in the first place, and that’s something we can do. And you may even want to set someone’s score to zero if someone unsubscribes from all marketing comms, from emails, SMS, whatever it may be, as this is then essentially saying, hey, I don’t want to hear about you, from you rather anymore. As you can see in this example, marketing and sales assign values to a person’s behavior and demographic information and weight them by their ability to influence a person’s interest and sales readiness. In the case of behaviors, an activity such as registering for a live event shows promise of interest, increasing the score by 10 in this example, but even more evident of interest is the same person actually attending the event, resulting in a much higher score change, further qualifying the person for sales. Demographic scoring can vary depending on the attributes that your companies, of your company’s ICP, but you may score a specific type of industry, healthcare in this example, higher than others based on your target audience. And this is why it’s critical that marketing and sales work together to build a scoring model so that proper weighting can be applied.

There are other types of scoring as well. We won’t cover these in great detail today, since today’s session is more of an introduction to basic scoring. However, these may give you an idea of where you want to perhaps head in the future. So product scoring is something that can be set up within Marketo where you may set up individual scores for your different products or service lines. This can be really useful for cross-sell or upsell opportunities. Account scoring is another one that you can set up within Marketo through the target account management add-on, which allows you to aggregate engagement across multiple leads in the same account. It’s a great option for those who have an ABM strategy. And then finally predictive scoring is something that you can’t really do in Marketo out of the box. However, other Adobe solutions such as our CDP or customer data platform has this capability, which can automatically calculate propensity to buy or engage churn and so on. It can do a lot of the automatic scoring for you. But hopefully that just gets your brain thinking of where you may want to go in the future. Now with that, I am going to pass over to Chris to talk more about build strategy. And Chris, just give me a yell when you want me to go to the next slide, but I’ll try my best to flip across. Absolutely. Thank you, Jeremy. All right. So thank you for that great setup about what scoring is, how it can be useful. But coming in, you really need to have a story or an understanding. And I know that Jeremy spoke about it a couple of different times, but it is truly very important to have that understanding with the sales team and the combined understanding of what your ideal customer profile is. So coming into that, it’s really good to understand the targets and being able to know exactly what your sales team is looking for. So, for example, you know that your sales team is really interested in the technology industry or they’re really interested in the United States or England, just really zeroing it down to a specific location or a specific set of criteria, which allows you to have the ability to say, this person fits, we’re going to give them a higher score, this person not so much, we’re going to give them a lower score or even, as said before, give them a negative value and just really hone in that particular understanding of what an ideal customer looks like. So when you send them over to sales, the sales team knows exactly what they’re getting. It’s not, hey, what is this person that you just brought over? I don’t know what to do with them. No, that’s really where that backbone came from of having that hand-in-hand communication the entire time. So an example here, you can see that we’re getting all of the desired information. So that’s another talk that you can have is what are the required fields that the sales team is looking for and you can build based off of it. So in this case, you have the prospect’s name, you have different pieces like the industry, the job title, the different time frames, the purchase time frames, things like that, and you can apply that score. So together, you can see that Dan does not fit very well because he’s in England and we focus primarily on the United States or you can see that Harold Hansen is doing great because they have a million plus revenue. So it really, 100 million plus revenue, so it really comes down to that conversation and building on it. And one thing that I do want to say before we go on to the next one is that these are not set in stone. So don’t feel like that the moment you say, hey, this is what it’s going to be, it’s going to be like that forever. No, this is always a moving target, right? Just like the trends of every day go over time, that’s always going to be transaction in seen inside of your Marketo instance as well. So don’t feel like you’re stuck to negative 50 points or plus 20 for this particular event. It’s always best practice to go through, feel how the type of leads that you’re sending over are working. Is it good? Can we massage it a little bit or even remove something entirely, right? So again, just keep that in mind as you guys are having that continuous back and forth conversation with the marketing and sales. All right, so in this one we’re identifying the buying signs. So you can see that this is more behavioral based, saying what types of behavior are really good in terms of the eyes of the sales team. So for example, the sales say, hey, we came out with this new product and we want to see specific interactions with that new product first. So you can see they visited a web page. Okay, well, does that web page equal that new product URL or is it the older product URL? So if it’s the newer one, okay, we’re going to give you plus 10 instead of plus five. So you can really hone in based off of not only did they visit a web page, but what page specifically, so you can get really nuanced in there. So the behavior again, visiting the web page, did they complete a survey? Are they a possible spam bot? Things like that. So really understanding not only the ideal location, is this person a c-suite, but what are they doing? How fast are they doing it? Jeremy made a huge point where don’t just give points because somebody did something. Think about the story of how that interaction works, right? So they visited a web page, but if they visit 25 web pages in one day, they could go straight into sales because you’re giving them 10 points every time they touch a website. Well, that doesn’t make sense, right? That’s not specifically what you’re wanting to send over to sales. So really understanding the storyline and then making sure that you have that additional logic built on top of your scoring. So it’s not just a plus or a negative, you’re just trying to give a value to that point in the story.

All right, so a threshold. This is a very interesting conversation and like I said before with the scoring in general, this is also a moving target. So this is just a random number that you can come up with and it doesn’t mean anything until you decide how to score the other parts. If you are giving 10 points to a website visit, well if you have somebody, if you have the score as 50, again that’s five visits to a website, we can bump that threshold score a little bit higher so it’s not so quick to hit that score. So don’t think of the threshold either. Again, this can be massaged either up or down. It’s just a general idea based off of the scores that you gave to your demographic and your behavior. So again, so we have it here. Running through the scenarios, right, go through the story. Like this is the due diligence of you’re creating your different scoring model. Does it make sense if somebody opens five emails and they get to be sent off to sales? Well, no. Okay, so you can either change that email open score or get rid of it completely or update your threshold. So it really comes down to what do you think makes sense and then like I said earlier, always come back and revisit. Does the scoring still make sense after you put it in for two months, five months? Does it still make sense? Do we need to update it or lower it? That type of thing. All right, so building within Marketo, there are many different ways that you can do it, but one thing that I really suggest is taking a look at the default programs. There are also programs that Adobe has offered that you can download directly in. So you’re not building from scratch. You still have those capabilities to see examples and have them built in and you can modify what’s already there.

But you can see that the default programs, you have an operational channel and using my tokens, that is a huge call out that will save you a lot of time and energy because using my tokens as your home, your owner profile, you can update that score in one spot and everywhere else that it is being used, it’s updated. So you don’t have to worry about hunting and pecking through all of your different scoring. And this is a really big godsend when you have a very complex scoring model. So you’re starting on the basics now, but this sucker will grow and grow and grow as your company and your development capabilities go. It will become something pretty incredible and very useful, but when you try and change it every couple of months, it’ll become a pain. So absolutely utilize my tokens and use those when you’re building out your actual.

And then when you are actually doing the logic, that’s happening inside of smart campaigns. So smart campaigns are used to actually change the score. It’s actually looking for, did somebody do something? Did they click on this specific URL? Okay, now send them over to the change plus or change minus score. So that is where the actual scoring changes happens are inside of these smart campaigns that you see here underneath the interactions folder on this screenshot. So like I said before, if you don’t want to build or if our hand-wavy explanations are a bit too much to put down on paper right now, Marketo does have a downloadable program library. And if you want to mess around with something, absolutely download this. These downloadable libraries are best practices. They’re not the only things that are available. So if something is in there and it doesn’t make sense for your company, go ahead and rip it out. No problem there. This is just for a get started. Get your thoughts running. Oh, that’s how they did it. Or that was a clever way of implementing. As we’re all aware, I’m sure Marketo is very powerful and it lets you do everything 25 different ways. So there’s not a magic way of doing something. So if it makes sense for you to do it this way, great. If it makes sense to build it from the Marketo program, that’s great. And then there is so much, so much documentation out there to help with this journey. If you have a specific question, I can almost guarantee you there’s some sort of blog post somewhere or some sort of documentation inside of Experience League or just going into the forums and just asking someone. This is an amazing, amazing community and everybody loves to help out. So please feel free to utilize all the tools available to you. And I’m sure that Jeremy and I would be happy if you have any questions that we’d be happy to talk about those.

All right. So the build process, this is at a very high level and again can be personalized to each one here on the call and to your needs, to your companies, to your sales goals, what have you. But in general, the first thing that you need to do is do a discovery. Understand the business objectives, understand the sales objectives, understand your customer. What is your ideal customer? What environment does that mean? What technology does that mean? How do they interact with you? How can you interact with them? So like building this whole picture of what that customer looks like, that ideal customer looks like and how you can interact back and forth with this person, it really starts setting that story. So having a good understanding of that baseline will get you going in the right direction. And then define. So apply the Marketo best practices. If you’re unsure of what that is, again, there’s so many pieces of documentation. There’s webinars like the one that you’re attending now. There’s the downloadable programs that will help get you started to set those best practices in motion. And then I can’t stress this enough, especially when you’re starting from scratch, document everything. Always document everything. Who made what decision? When it was done? Scoring for this reason? Why didn’t we do this? All of those things. When paint hits the pavement or tires at the pavement, those questions always come back around. So if you have documentation saying this is what we’re doing and why and what the decision was and everything like that, you’re going to thank yourself for going through. I know it’s tedious. It’s one of my favorite parts of my job too. But great documentation is worth its weight in gold. So really make sure that everybody, all of the stakeholders involved with the decisions are all okay with the documentation. They all sign off on it and you’re ready to go.

Anybody who’s on boarding, sending it to people who are not involved in the decision-making processes. It’s really great to have everybody on the same page, even if they weren’t involved, so that they understand the story and why the scoring was the way it is. In the deliver phase, you’re actually building it. You build the solution inside of the Marketo environment. So this is going through and deciding how you want to do that logic. Like I said, there’s so many different ways that Marketo will let you implement this logic. It really is making sure that you feel, again, this is not set in stone. You have a good way to implement this vision. You feel good with it. Boom. Now you start your testing. Finalize your pieces and start sending yourself, other persons on your team through. Make sure that the scoring is actually doing what it’s doing. The different phases are moving people throughout your environment. So it is marketing qualified, sales qualified. Am I getting reset at the correct time? It really pays to do your due diligence because, again, this will end up affecting your sales team. And we all know that that is a very loud part of our companies.

And then if we go to the drive, the maturity of the customer revenue performance management capabilities across the delivery phases. So this is really saying, okay, we did all of this work. Now let’s use it. How well is it performing? Is it doing as well as we think? Are the numbers higher? Are they lower? Is sales happy with the quality of persons that are being provided? Yes. All right. Let’s keep going. Can we tweak it to provide even more feedback to allow even faster sales turnover? Or it’s not working. It’s lower numbers than we anticipated. Okay, why? Why was that? Do some research, do some testing, really dig into the numbers and see how it’s working for you. And then there should be a little bit of an arrow here that does all the way back to the discovery phase, and you start over. You take your learnings from the first go round, and now let’s do it again. What can we do with these numbers? What can we change? What can we fiddle with? How can we change that inside of Marketo? Is there a best practice that we learned from it? Yeah. Wash, rinse, repeat. This is never set in stone.

All right. So let’s talk into interesting moments.

Interesting moments allow you to define what your sales team really, really wants to know about a person. And one thing that I really love about interesting moments is not only can you set up the moment captured, but you can send an email or a message directly to your sales team the moment somebody does this inside of Marketo. So if there’s some super high value thing, target, interaction, person filled out a specific form, a high value form, or they are interested in this white paper that is the hottest item that’s being created from your company, you can send that information directly to the sales team and specify which salesperson gets it. So it’s a very, very surgical tool that allows you to not only have a good scoring against, but it allows for directed approaches based off of if somebody did one of these interesting moments. So you can view these interesting moments inside of your CRM if you have Marketo sales insight. So that is a very big call out there. The MSI integration, it is an incredibly powerful tool for your sales team and it really gives a visual deep dive, let’s call it, directly into your scoring and your interesting moments. So instead of the salesperson saying, hey, can you create a report of all the people who did this specific thing in the past five days with interesting moments, you can send that directly to them. They’ll see it on their CRM page and they’ll be able to scroll through it themselves. They’ll be able to see some stars and flames. So you can see on this example here, John Smith, he only has one flame, so he’s not as hot as some of the other ones. But his star rating is getting there too. So his interaction is kind of slow and his score is showing that as well. So he doesn’t have 200 points with one flame, so he doesn’t have a lot of history with you, like a repeat customer or something. And his current iteration, he’s not that hot, he’s at the beginning of the journey. Or boom, he has three flames, he’s as hot as they get and his score is going high, he has three stars. It really gives at a glance what your sales team needs to know and lets them understand who should I be talking to today, that type of thing. So there’s a lot of things that we can talk about, Marketo Sales Insights, and how interesting moments ties into that.

Excuse me. All right, let’s talk about some examples.

All right, so an example of the behavior score. This is part of the documentation, this type of table that should be a part of your documentation, where you’re able to talk with your sales team and say, these are the different criteria, these are the different activities. So it clicks in a link in an email or specifically for forms, I want to have fills out content form or a contact sales. You can see that the contact sales form has plus 30, it’s much more interesting, it’s a much higher raised hand event. So this is what you would be looking at. Frequency, how often do I want this to happen? Do I only want it to happen one time or do I want it to happen every single time somebody does it? So clicks a link in an email. Again, I’ve seen clients who will not do this at all based off of, do they really value that clicked link or do they have an issue with bots? Most of the time there’s some sort of scrubber that will click on every single link in an email and it doesn’t provide much value. So that really comes down to everybody’s personal interaction, if that’s a valuable piece or not. But you can see how that story that we were talking about before, does it make sense that if all the person does for, I don’t know, six months, they click on every single link in an email and after six months this person could eventually MQL or become sales qualified, does that make sense? So again, going through checking all the different activities here that we have posted and the different scores, the stories make sense. One thing that you can consider here for the decay score based off of inactivity is never go below zero because again, let’s say this person was sitting there for six months and once a month they lose 10 points. So let’s say they’re at negative 60 now and all of a sudden they start grabbing on every single piece of content that you throw at them. There’s still going to be a negative value because they have such a deficit that you can’t see all of this activity now, this positive activity. So a lot of what I’ve seen that works very well is have some logic that says remove if not below zero. So set to zero, don’t go any lower. But this is the type of documentation, this table going through talking with your sales team and making sure that it makes sense to everybody why we’re doing it this way, keeping that communication open. And then that interesting moment column when you have MSI is really important too. You don’t have an unlimited number of interesting moments. I can’t remember the exact off the top of my head. But this will allow the sales team to specifically say, hey, I am really interested in the sales fills out form and they attended a live event. We are really interested in that. Also if they attended a webinar. So they can get those not only sent directly to them as a notification, but also you can see it on their web page. So very powerful tool, visual tool to go through this. So happy to talk about this. Anybody has any questions? And then here based off of a threshold of 100, you can see that here is more of the demographic of the annual revenue high. You need to decide what does a high annual revenue mean. So you can change those values and you can play around and say, hey, we’ve decided that they need to have at least 100 million, or maybe you’re going for a smaller value of 10 million. So it really depends on what you consider and you can set those values inside of Marketo as part of smart campaigns. But this is what the demographic side would look like. There’s not necessarily interesting moments for that one because interesting moments focuses primarily on activity. But you can see that the industry, you can go based off of job title, number of employees, their location, their company name, so you can weed out your competitors. Or again, your own employees. You can also do that with emails based off of their email name. So again, really, really, really amazing how detailed you can get. Or you can keep it relatively simple like this. Keeping it high, medium, low, or just doing a couple pieces at the beginning and seeing if you like it. If it makes sense to do a demographic score for for your company or not. All right, so again, not just for B2B. Jeremy did make a couple of shout outs there that there’s a lot of good capabilities for Marketo to do scoring specifically for the B2C instance. So a lot of times you’ll have your online retailers or whatnot who will be able to do things based off of specific ages or high average order. Or, hey, this is a new time that they’re coming in for us. Let’s set their value back to zero.

Or did they hit a certain rank and now they are valued like a high value customer, right? Their total lifetime spend is above $10,000. They’ve reached the next scoring value. So you can really get very intricate based off of your story that you’re attempting to do. And it really is how you are interacting with those different activities. So if your story, again, it comes down to your story. If your story is more B2B focused, those activities can be seen through that lens. Or if you’re more on the B2C side, just envision those activities that somebody’s doing and score based off of that lens. All right, so higher education. This is also a very common one. You can do it based off of the academic background. Do they match your requirements? Are they within the ACP age range or are they coming back for later study? So you can identify that. Are they referral from an alumni? So you can get really specific based off of that attribute. So this is more of the custom pieces or more of the demographic side. Whereas on the university, they engage with student testimonials. How active are they? Are they someone who you would like to focus more material on? That type of thing. So it really comes down to what type of content you’re trying to send out or the ideal customer profile that you’re looking to bring in.

Financial services, another big one. Another tricky, tricky one. Financials. But you’ll see that there’s a lot of very common redundancies, but just twisted, just the slightest amount to fit that particular bracket. So the age range has changed a little bit, but still there’s always going to be that type of content. So you can see that there’s a lot of different completes an application. Again, it’s either for alone or for going into college. So there’s going to be similarities. It just changes on the story that you’re looking for.

All right. Awesome. Thanks very much, Chris. We might move on to some key takeaways and tips in the remaining few minutes that we have. We’ll walk through these and again, chime in, Chris, as well as we go through them. The first one is building your scoring model in a central location within Marketo or more specifically within the marketing activity section. Technically, it is possible to change a score value within any smart campaign that you’ve got within Marketo. Don’t do that because if you do and have seen that in the past with some customers, it can be really difficult to figure out what smart campaigns are awarding these scores. And when you have to make those adjustments, you’ve got to go to every other different place. Having a scoring model built within a default program in the marketing activities using my tokens is definitely best practice and will make your life a lot easier when you do have to make those tweaks. As Chris touched on earlier, if you don’t want to build something from scratch, we do have the Marketo program library, which you can import a demographic and behavioral story model from that can be a good starting point. Also to Chris’s earlier point, we have a number of other best practice program templates in there for basic nurtures, newsletter sends, content downloads and the like. So feel free to have a look at those. If you don’t know where they are or how they function, shout out in the chat. We can share some links as well in a follow up to this session.

I think the next one is revisiting your scoring model. I think Chris really sort of hit this home. It should be a living document. It should be something that you look to iterate on. It isn’t a set and forget. And the reality is that it won’t be perfect from the get go. And that’s fine. But having something up and running and then getting that constant sort of feedback loop from sales, from marketing, from any other stakeholder that may be involved is critical. In an ideal world, you’re making adjustments and looking at this maybe once a month or once a quarter, but everyone’s very busy and time poor these days. So maybe even if it’s at a minimum of six months or maybe a bit more in that initial stage, but after that every six months, I think hold you in good stead. Chris, I don’t know if there were any others on this that you wanted to talk to? No, I think that it’s the high level. I know that we’re up on time here, but I really think that the story is your main drive and having that communication with the sales team is really important. And those two things, along with documenting everything will really get you where you need to go and get started. Don’t wait for perfection, get something down there and get that data. The more data you get, the better you can answer the questions specifically for your needs. Yeah, absolutely. So with that, I know we are at time, but if Brad’s still around, we might look if we can potentially answer some of these. I’m here. Yep, perfect. Do we want to look at answering some of these questions here if both yourself and Chris have a few minutes there, or if not, we can maybe take those questions away and follow up with them. I’m not sure which route you’d rather go with. Yes, I’m here. Chris, can you stay on a little longer or do you have to jump off? I can stay. Okay, cool. Let’s have a look at some of the questions that have come through. A few of them from Dominic and Terry, we’ve already answered. Kay has asked, could we please share a link? Yes, we’ll definitely do that. And also, would it be possible to schedule another session focused on creating a grading lead scoring model for B2B? So focus more on that demographic side of things. That’s something that we can definitely take on board. And Brad, we can have a chat about this. I know we’re looking at different topics that we want to group. The next session will be focused more so on that certification. But definitely something that we can take on board and look at doing in the new year. Additionally, there’s a lot of documentation around scoring, in particular, the grading side of things or demographics. So we might sort of share some of that in the follow up as well.

I would absolutely take a look at those downloadable programs. There’s a lot of useful information in there. So it might answer your questions just by poking around in that. Yep, very cool. And then Kay has asked, do you by any chance have a sample of reports you can share with sales teams? Depends on exactly what they’re wanting to see. It depends also maybe what you have as part of your MyKeto subscription. You could set up at a very basic level, you may set up report subscriptions within MyKeto. You may set up email notifications that are going out from MyKeto. But if you’ve got MyKeto sales insight within your CRM, that’s going to give your sales team a much more greater view into your customers, or both to see the different things that they’re doing and how and why their score may be accumulating, hopefully, or why it may be decreasing as well.

Yeah, it’s a tough one, but we can share some documentation on that one.

The next one, how does the Interesting Moments notification show up to the sales reps? Yeah, that’s a good question. So the Interesting Moments itself is essentially a trigger so if you have a smart campaign and they say Interesting Moment triggered, then you can do inside of your flow step afterwards many different ways. You can send it as a literal email, like they can receive it as an email. You can get a bit more complicated with sending some sort of text message or chat with a webhook. Or you can have, if you’re integrated within a CRM, you can actually have a notification in the CRM pop-up. So it really depends on your current setup, but you can be very specific in that flow step. Yeah, that’s a good call out. And then the last question that I think we’ll have time for today is from George. So in higher education, we have a long sales cycle, so how would you suggest retrospectively updating older leads that are still sort of working? I mean, my take on this would be from a demographic perspective, you may want to look at potentially retroactively applying a demographic score to those older people within your database. But from a behavioural perspective, I wouldn’t be giving any scores to them based on things they’ve done months or years ago, since it’s not really relevant to the now. What I would say though is, as more of a general comment, four records that are old have been sitting in your database. They haven’t been, there hasn’t been any sort of increase in their score for a very long time. I mean, there are different ways you may want to approach that. One that you may want to go down is looking at creating some type of re-engagement nurture or in re-engagement campaign. So, you know, these people have been laying their dormant. Can a particular, you know, high level nurture or special offer look at getting them to begin re-engagement? If that can, then hopefully that gets them back on track to having some sort of interest in your case, in higher education, and looking at doing a course down the track. Yeah, so I think that’s pretty much all the time we have today. I’m not sure, Brad, if you had any wrap up potentially? Yes, I was going to mention this for George. We also have an educational focused user group that is all about use cases and users and practitioners and admins that are specific to the education use case. We know that’s a very, very common use case of Marketo and KA. It’s not B2B. So, I highly recommend joining that chapter. I think it’s a good place to leave it. Chris, Jeremy, thank you so much for your time. If you have any follow-up questions, I also shouted this out for KA, but we have a monthly office hours. We took off September because we’re just getting our new champion cohort into place, but the second Thursday of every month. So, that will be October 9th will be our next one. Or we’ll have a champions presenting and answering questions. So, if you have any follow-ups, that’ll be a great one there. Also in October will be our final, our fifth and final foundational mug for this year. And it will be all about preparing for the professional exam. So, putting everything that we’ve been talking about for these last few sessions and going to the next step. I’m also doing a little work on the back end, trying to see if I can get some vouchers for some certification exams. So, stay tuned for that if you are interested. One last time. Chris, Jeremy, anything you want to finish with? No. No, I think just look at giving it a go. It’s not going to be perfect from the get-go. Getting something basic up and running from a scoring perspective, I think is the best way to begin. Otherwise, sometimes when you try and get into the weeds and you have many stakeholders involved, sometimes that can stop you from getting started at all.

No, I think you said it very well, Jeremy. Don’t let great be the enemy of good. Just get started. And no, I’m just very excited because I remember when I was in your guys’ shoes and really take advantage of all of those documentation, the downloadable form programs and whatnot. Those were my education when I got started. So, I was able to take that and build on it and get all the way up to Marketo Champion. So, just keep working, keep looking around, keep asking questions. Again, this community is fantastic and there are people out there willing to help.

Thank you both. Appreciate you staying on a little bit extra. And we’ll see everybody on the next one. Have a great day. Thanks, everyone. Bye. Bye.