Marketo and Mochas - Lead Scoring

Transcript

So hello everybody and welcome to Marketo and Mocha’s lead scoring. We have a lot to get to today, so I’m just gonna jump right in and get us started, even though I still see people hopping on, but everybody will catch up. So, welcome again to Marketo and Mocha’s. This is our first session of what will be an ongoing series and we’ve designed it to be interactive. So we encourage you to ask questions in the questions box on the GoToWebinar control panel. Throughout the presentation, you type them in there and we’ll do our best to answer as many of those for you as we can. So I wanna quickly mention a few housekeeping items before we get started. This event is a take on a similar series that the DX Strategy team hosts for our Adobe Commerce customers called Commerce and Coffee. So the idea is for customers to grab your morning or afternoon mocha, join us for about an hour to learn from some of Adobe’s experts about the topic of discussion, which today is lead scoring. So we will be recording this webinar to be viewed on demand and shared with other members of your team that may not be able to attend today. Audio is routed through your computer, so please ensure that your speakers are not muted. If you can hear me, then you should be good to go. We’re gonna leave a few minutes at the end to answer questions, so feel free to start asking those throughout the presentation, but if your question is not answered, please follow up with your customer success manager for additional information. And at the end of the webinar, please complete the short survey that’s gonna pop up on your screen to help us deliver the best and most relevant information to you at our future customer exclusive events.

So let’s dive into today’s agenda. First, I’m gonna formally introduce myself and welcome our business advisors, Cynthia Chang and Kelvin Ng. Cynthia will take us through today’s presentation on everything from what lead scoring is to some more in-depth strategies on how to approach a lead scoring model, and then Kelvin will run through a demonstration of how to set it up and utilize the lead scoring functions in Marketo Engage. So after the demo, we will end with a few minutes of Q&A, so please, as I mentioned, ask those questions throughout the presentation, and if your question is not answered, please do follow up your customer success manager for additional information.

So to introduce myself, my name is Alana Cohen, and I’m on the customer success strategy team here at Adobe. I’ve been with Adobe for over four years, and I’ve spent the last two years working within Adobe’s Digital Experience customer strategy team, organizing and hosting our customer exclusive events. So prior to my time on this team, I spent two years working with Adobe’s advertising cloud customers, creating data-driven campaigns to help customers implement and execute their advertising strategies. And before coming to Adobe, I spent around 10 years at different advertising agencies around New York, working with brands to help them launch and optimize their advertising campaigns. So if you would like to connect with me on LinkedIn, please feel free, and if you have any questions or comments about today’s event or any of our customer exclusive events, please do reach out. So I’d like to now pass things over to our speakers to introduce themselves and get us started. So Cynthia, please take it away.

Thank you, Alana. Hello, everyone, thanks for joining us today. It’s a pleasure to be here. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a senior business advisor at Adobe, focusing on Market Law Engaged products. Prior to this role, I was a business consultant working with many Adobe customers on their Market Law Engaged implementations and optimization projects. And like many of you, I was a Market Law customer myself in my past life. So please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m excited to share with you what I have seen from my consulting experience, and as well as the lessons that I’ve learned as an ex-Market Law customer. Hi, everyone. Happy Thursday, or what I like to call Friday junior. My name is Calvin Ng. I’m also a business advisor here at Adobe, working with the growth segment. I’ve been at Adobe for about three years, coming on to my third year, October 14th. So super excited about that. Spent the past year helping build this team with Cynthia to essentially help customers like yourself gain value in the tool and understand the maturity of how to get to certain places within Marketo. And then prior to that, I was also a part of our enterprise consulting team, working with implementations, migrations, everything on the side with Marketo. And then prior to that, I actually worked with a separate consulting team outside of Adobe, working with our competitor, Salesforce Marketing Cloud. So I’m also a Salesforce Marketing Cloud certified consultant. But excited to share all the fun things around lead scoring. Thank you, Calvin.

All right. So what is lead scoring and how do you implement it? In today’s session, our goal is to provide you with an overview of lead scoring and how it works in Marketo. We’ll also discuss some best practice strategy and considerations and have a demo to show you how you can get started with lead scoring in your Marketo instance. Your Marketo automation tool generates a massive amount of customer data. And that creates a challenge to find your ideal prospect in a sealed data. There are a lot of activities being tracked in the tool. And you have to see if there are thousands of visual activities and profile data to single out the person who is ready for a sales conversation. For example, four individuals may perform the same action to download a piece of white paper from your website for a single day. From your website for different reasons. One might be an existing customer just trying to make sure she’s getting the most out of her purchase. Another might be an ideal prospect actually considering a solution. Yet another might be an employee just looking for documentation on corporate website. Another might be a competitor doing research. So not all leads should be treated equal. And scoring is what allows you to identify quality of leads based on a valid attribute.

Marketing. As marketing, we’re often focused on quantity of generation. So we’re always trying to generate as many leads as much as possible and pass them off to sales. While sales are actually more focused on quality of those leads that are more likely to convert. Because they don’t have the capacity to follow every single lead. And they need to prioritize their effort. So how do you bridge the gap between marketing and sales? How do you identify the hot lead that sales should prioritize? And the warm leads that marketing should continue to nurture. Scoring is the methodology that help both marketing and sales team identify the priority and quality of the leads. And thus improve marketing and sales alignment efficiency. Lead scoring is a shared sales and marketing methodology for ranking leads in order to determine their sales readiness. If you don’t remember anything from the presentation today, just remember this. And again, the key word here is that it’s a shared sales and marketing methodology. It doesn’t matter what scoring model marketing team is using. If you don’t have buy-in and prior agreement from the sales team on a scoring model and the methodology being used, your leads can be rejected upon handing off to sales. Oftentimes, we see marketing team getting very excited. Sometimes too excited on developing their own lead scoring model without getting any input or buy-in from the sales team. And the result is a very low sales acceptance rate or conversion rate. Lead scoring allow both marketing and sales to be successful by making sure we route the most qualified lead to sales based on, again, the agree upon methodology.

So some benefits of lead scoring. Marketable engaged lead scoring allow you to configure custom-weighted scoring models based on virtually any customer activity or inactivity that updates in real time for qualifying leads and counts as quickly and accurate as possible and hand them off to sales while the leads are still hot. Scoring allow you to determine the level of interest of the lead in your business and solution. Scoring can also help you rank leads to see who fits your target customer profile. You can also just simply use scoring to count the number of times something was done. Perhaps it’s the number of interactions with certain product or solutions. Scoring can help you focus your marketing on your best target to improve marketing and sales productivity and thus increase revenue more quickly. If you’re not using lead scoring, your marketing and sales team may struggle to know when a lead and account is qualified or qualified enough to be followed by sales rep. For growing business with a large sales force base, we can imagine it is important to do this quickly and at scale to fill the sales funnel.

Scoring also interacts with your lead management process in a full circle. A person’s interaction with a marketing campaign generates an activity log in Marketable’s activity log. This activity triggers a scoring campaign that gives someone points. Getting points would move that person forward in their customer lifecycle. And the stage in the lifecycle where they are in the lifecycle may detect the type of content you want to nurture that person with. So you might want to drop them into different nurture stream or different nurture campaign based on their lead score.

So how does it work? How does scoring work in Marketable? Unlike other marketing automation products, Marketable does not have a fixed lead scoring model that you need to follow. In fact, Marketable’s lead scoring functionality gives you the flexibility to create custom scores and scoring models to accommodate any lead scoring design choice. So for those of you who are familiar with Marketable’s smart campaign automation workflow, you will leverage the same smart campaign functionality to identify the criteria of the people you want to score on and assign either positive or negative points to the qualified people. Marketable will then just perform simple math to aggregate all the scoring point values to calculate the total score. So how do you decide the right scoring model? I want to first say that there is no absolute right or wrong way to a lead scoring model. The best lead scoring model is the one that’s, again, agreed upon with your sales team, and that works best for your organization. As Adobe’s best practice, though, we do encourage you and your sales team to look at your ideal prospect in at least two dimensions. You want to consider both demographic and behavior. So demographic is where you want to look at their qualifications to identify who you want to do business with. This may be based on their demographic criteria, such as industry or company size, or can be based on the personal attributes, such as job title persona. You also want to weigh in on their engagement. Are they showing behavior that they are interested in your business or want to do business with you? Maybe they attended your events, or they request a trial, or maybe they’ve been poking around on your website on the pricing page. As a best practice recommendation, we do suggest that you place more weight on behavioral engagement, because that’s where they are showing their intent so that you know they are actually interested in you.

So what contributes to a behavioral score? With Marketo, you can score virtually any digital behavior and interactions that track the Marketo or available in Marketo. Here are some simple behavioral items that we see people commonly score on. You can score on their digital interactions, such as email engagement or if they fill out a form. Not all forms are the same. A contactless form and content form should have different weight-to-weight interactions. Different weight because it shows different intent. You can also score on their engagement with your web content if they download a PDF or visit your web page. And again, different type of web page or PDF content may have different points too. You can also score on their status change in the program. For example, if they attended an event or visited a booth at a trade show. If there are no activity over a certain period of time, you can also score on that, and it would be a negative score or score decay. These are not the only items that you can score on. You should work with your team to identify what sort of behavior is an indicator of interest in your business and by what channels can someone interact with your business. Not all channels should be treated equal either. Direct website traffic and referral website traffic can have different weight in their scores because the intent is different. So what contributes to a demographic score? You can score pretty much anything you like as long as you have the data in your database. It is also important to be mindful about your data hygiene or integrity. If you’re missing many key data or if you have bad or dirty data in your database, your demographic score is not going to be very accurate and helpful.

Here are some simple demographic items that companies commonly use. So again, you can look at their demographic information. Maybe they have high revenue or perhaps they belong to the target industry or target account that your team is pursuing. You can also score based on their personal attributes, such as having a desirable job title or have a relevant job function. And again, you can also have a score decay for undesirable attributes. So for example, if you’re a B2B business, you may want to assign negative points to your business you may want to assign negative points or score decay for someone that give you a non-business email address. And again, this will be different for you. You may have different data sets and your team may have opinions on what attributes are more important. D-suite type of job titles may not always be the most desirable or warrant the highest score because perhaps your sales team don’t really talk to C-suites. They may pursue manager and director level who are the actual decision maker for your solution.

Here are some best practice considerations that I want to share. So scoring, decay, and reset. People often ask if they should depreciate or reset score, when and how often to deduct points. We do recommend scoring decay for undesirable attributes or actions or just over time. So you know people don’t have a high score just because they did something long time ago. If they haven’t shown any engagement for a certain period of time, maybe say 30 days, you can assign negative points. There are also different ways you can approach score decay. Some people might assign a positive score for certain actions upon it happens. So say if I visit a website, I get five points. And depreciate one point every week thereafter until it’s offset. A simpler way to this is to have a global campaign that is looking for inactivity. So you look for someone who has not shown any engagement. For example, no email click, no web visit, no phone fail, no program status change, nothing that you are aware of or you can track for the past period of time for maybe, say, 30 days. And then you can deduct X points overall from the school. Score reset is also common and a recommended practice. For whenever you need to start over a person’s score. Typically, it is after you hand off to sales team or maybe after the lease recycle. We also recommend resetting the score when you make updates to your scoring program so you can have a fresh start.

Threshold, what should be your score threshold? And again, there’s really no absolute answer to this, but we like to recommend using 100 points just because the number 100 is kind of a magical number and it’s easy for human mind to understand. And typically, what we find is that it’s easy to explain to the sales team that when a person has 80 points out of 100, it’s 80% there. Using 100 points can also help your team decide how much weight you might want to place on your demographic or behavior attributes. Maybe your team wants to have an 80-20 breakdown to have 80% of the total score come from behavioral engagement and 20% from demographic qualifications.

Now, how many of these scores can you have? Many organizations may want to or need to have separate scores for each of their product or business unit. And technically speaking in Marketo, there’s no limit to how many of these scores or custom scores that you can set up in Marketo. However, my advice is that you should have as many as you need, but more importantly, as many as you can actually manage. When you do have multiple lead scores, we do recommend you maintain some sort of standardization across all your scores. So there is a consistency that allow you to compare scores. For example, we would typically recommend having the same way to points for behavioral scoring because an email click is an email click. But allowing each of these unit to place different weight in their demographic scoring because they may have different criteria for their ideal prospect based on the business unit or target profile.

If you do need to have multiple lead scores, how do you build for scalability? We recommend leveraging Marketo’s program functionality and utilizing program tokens to manage your scoring activities. This allows you to build a scoring template at a program level and programs in Marketo allow you to clone and scale for multiple lead score management. In our demo, Kelvin will show you how to use program tokens to manage your score changes.

Last but not least, how do you know if your lead scoring is effective? You want to be sure to have a feedback loop with your sales team to validate that the leads being passed up to sales are actually qualified and converting to opportunity. We recommend that you set up a committee to monitor and collect feedback from your teams on what’s working and what’s not. Is marketing passing too many leads, too few leads? What percentage of MQLs are converting to SQLs? That will tell you the quality of leads and whether your threshold is too high or too low.

Going to something that you don’t want to set and forget, you want to review and reiterate on a periodic basis. We recommend quarterly at a minimum or if you have a longer sales cycle, then review it based on the average length of your sales cycle. Sales and marketing teams should meet regularly to review the cycle, look for trends, and adjust the scoring process as factors may change.

Let’s look at some research findings that can help offer some perspectives. The average buyer is roughly 70% along their journey when they click Count status. They already interacted with about seven pieces of content. So that’s a lot of opportunity for us to score those interactions and better nurture them along that journey. Speaking of nurture, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost. And we can leverage these scoring here to ensure we drop them to the appropriate nurture campaign based on their interaction with us. When it comes to conversion rate, a benchmark research from Salesforce shows that on average, about 13% lead convert to opportunity and even less, only 6% of opportunity convert to sales. And every organization is different. And in fact, I would not recommend you to compare yourself to this benchmark, but I would recommend you to pull your current at past conversion metrics as your own benchmark. So you will be able to see the difference before and after you implement lead scoring. Even if the conversion rate stays the same, a successful lead scoring should allow you to see the improvement in your sales velocity in the duration of a sales cycle. And that is how you can evaluate the effectiveness of your only scoring model.

Another interesting finding from the research is that customer employee referrals and company website and social media and company website and social channels tend to have highest MQL to SQL conversion rate and fastest progression to deals. And again, every organization is different, but if this is also true for your organization, interactions with this type of channel may be where you want to score higher in your scoring model.

A surprising twist though is that while webinar and websites seem to produce highly to opportunity conversion, they however have very low close one rate. So this again, might be something your team wants to take into consideration when scoring your webinars and website interactions.

Okay, I’ve said a lot of things now. I’m going to hand it off to Kelvin who will show us a demo on how to get started with lead scoring by importing the scoring program template from the Marketo program library and make updates based on your own criteria.

Kelvin? Kelvin, I think you’re on mute. Oh, sorry. Thank you, Alana. I was on mute. So let’s jump right in. The whole concept of this demo is to one, show everyone on the call, whether you have a scoring program or don’t have a scoring program set within your instance, how to get that within, in place in your MarketoEngage instance. So we’re first going to walk through how to import what we consider our MarketoEngage lead scoring best program, best practice program. And there’s two programs that we’ll be looking at. One is going to be behavioral and the other demographic. So the first thing is we’re going to walk into one, market activities. Then we’re going to go into new.

From new, we’re going to go into import program. This is going to bring up the import program wizard, which is essentially just a way to one, look at the connection to our Marketo best program library, as well as other instances that you might be connected to. So you’ll see here that there’s one, certain things you might not see within your instance or different subscriptions you’ll have. Those are just essentially connections that we have set within your instance. So you could pull different programs from another place. Now, the specific subscription we’re going to look at is the Marketo program library. And everyone should have this within their instance today.

I’m going to want to pull in the first scoring program, which is the behavioral program. And so I’ve already essentially imported this in just to save time, but I’m going to walk you guys through the import wizard so you can get a feel of how this works. The first thing to really focus on is the description. So it gives a little summary of what’s within this program, but the big thing to call out is the required custom fields. So it’s asking us and telling us pretty vaguely that we need to have a behavior score that’s set as a score type. Now, if you don’t have this field built in your instance already, and you go through this import wizard, it’s actually going to send an error message. Now that’s not the end of the world, but I just want to call it out just in case so you guys don’t get confused if you do plan on importing this in.

Now I’ll go to next and I’ll take us through step two, which is essentially where we’re going to place this program.

We’ll go into campaign folder. In most cases, we place programs of this nature in operational, and then in my instance, I have a tag. So I’ll put this as marketing manager.

When I go through next, we’ll go through the default conflict rules. And this is essentially just to say, how do we want to place this within our instance? To ensure that we’re not duplicating anything or creating extra assets, I’m actually going to unclick use default conflict rules. You’re going to go through and hit ignore, use destination template, replace items in subscription, and then replace existing template. And again, this is just to ensure that we don’t duplicate anything that’s going on as we import in.

When I go to next, we’ll hit a summary slide.

And this will just again go through what we’re doing within our import. One, the program name, the description tied to the program, as well as the conflict resolution summary.

I’m going to hit cancel just because I’ve already imported this in, but if you were to hit import to the right hand side, there’ll be essentially a little summary. There’ll be a progress bar showing, here’s how long it’s taking, it’ll slowly process through, have a little circle. And then once it actually imports into your instance, there’ll be a green check and a link into your actual program. Now I’ll go into operational folder, since I’ve already imported this in, and we’ll start walking through the first scoring program. I’m going to unclick all the folders just so we can get a gist of what’s going on in here. And as you can see, there’s a lot of stuff. But we’ll focus on a few key programs that we consider general and mostly used throughout the industry. So one, you can start seeing under the interactions that there’s a bunch of different smart campaigns. Each of these smart campaigns are tied to a specific behavioral action. Now, the first one that we’ll look at is pretty common and it’s email clicks, link and email.

The smart list is going to denote what it’s going to take for someone to become eligible for this specific score. In this case, we’re looking at a trigger, which is looking at actions that are present in future. And we’re saying if email is any, link not contains PDF and unsubscribe, will be then eligible for a score which will walk in the flow step. Now, this is a pretty vague smart list parameter.

Business to business, one thing we can say is you’ll have to go in and add your own data and different metrics of how you play around. In most cases, when we’re building out scoring and we’re looking at different actions, we wanna make sure that they’re high value. So in this case, this is gonna look at every link that is in a PDF and unsubscribe. And for some companies that will work, but a better recommendation could essentially say, if you have high value links and you have built out naming convention for them, instead we could say email is any, link contains high value link.

Now in the flow step, this is where all the meat is done in all the magic. You’ll see that there’s two scores being set. So the first one is person score, which is the aggregate between the behavioral and demographic. And so we’re adding in this behavior aspect into the total. And then independently, we’re gonna add in the behavior score. And this allows us to see the difference between the total, which is driving by two different machines, and then the singular, which is what is the weight of behavior score when it comes to our total.

And then in the right hand side, you’ll see the actual change or where we’re appending the score. Now, this might be a little confusing because it’s a token. So it’s not really showing us what the score is or what’s happening. You could hard code something like plus 20 in here, but we actually recommend that you add in a token. And so one, how do we find out where that token is and what the value is and why do we use tokens? So when I go into the behavioral program, and I just essentially click in the top level and I go to my tokens, you’re gonna actually pull a menu of different behavioral actions or tokens that we built out for each of these campaigns. And the reason being for building out tokens versus hard coding is as your business scales and as we treat this model as living and breathing, it means that there’s gonna have to be a lot of changes that happen in between.

And if there’s one thing that we’ve called out pretty often is we don’t wanna just set it and forget it. So by adding in tokens, it gives us the scalability and efficiency to make changes at one place, rather than go into each of these campaigns one by one and change each of those scores for every single campaign. And for the users that are always in Marketo, you know how much of a pain that is, we can actually just go in and just change the values here. And that gives us a flexibility to play around and be efficient rather than wasting time building and stepping in through those campaigns. So the first one that we looked at was essentially my email clicks. So we have a high value and a low value. In this case, we’ll look at the high value and we’ll want to go through and see or how this is actually gonna work. So the first thing is if you wanna edit the token itself, you can go in and double click. I’m not sure why it went down there. And this will allow you to essentially pick in, change the number if you’d like, and then hit save. Now, if you wanna do something that isn’t already a part of this menu, you can actually just drag over a score and then it will bring up a my token. So in this case, we could do something like social, high value, and then we could add plus 15.

And then you’ll hit save.

Now, going back into the behavior program itself, when we start going through again, instead of having to go in and change, we could just pull in that token as it reads on that menu.

Now, another common scoring activity that a lot of businesses use is filling out a contact us form. This is obviously a very important action. It’s literally, I think, one of the biggest signals for someone to say, hey, I’m ready to do business with you guys, or I wanna learn more about your business. So in the smart list, we’re gonna see something pretty simple. Another trigger, so it fills out form, form name contains contact. In this case, again, this is a vague value. It’s gonna depend on your business and how you structure your contact us forms.

But then we’ll go to flow and you’ll start seeing a similar structure, right? Again, change score for person score to add to the total, and then change for the behavior score so we can independently see what’s going on behaviorally. And then in this case, we’ll see my.forms fills out contact form. Again, just to check what that actual value is, we’ll go into the token menu and we’ll see that it’s plus 30, which makes complete sense. Since it’s a larger score, it’s gonna push them higher to that threshold, which means they’re moving faster down the funnel to become MQL and then sent the sales.

The next action that we wanna look at is program status changes.

And this is primarily gonna lean on how we have our channels and set this as built out.

We’ll look at specifically a live event status. And in this case, we’re gonna do a program statuses change trigger with any program that has a new status from live event to attended. So in this case, if I dropped on this menu, you see that in live event, we have various statuses that a person can go through. And if they move to attended through any action, we’re gonna score on that.

Again, a similar structure, person score, behavior score, and then the token itself. We’ll go look just to see what that token is. And again, it’s plus 30, which we would consider a high value action.

Now, another aspect of scoring that isn’t all about adding is subtracting. There are some actions that people don’t take or do that we don’t actually want to push them down the funnel. We want to actually set them back. So a common essentially decay score is activity based.

And so from a structure standpoint, here’s a pretty simple smart list for no activity. Definitely could add more to this, but no score was changed. Score name is behavior score in the past 30 days. This is also gonna depend on the business and just the sales cycle and the activity that people are interacting with. Not person was created in the past 30 days. And then one interesting call out is their behavior score is greater than 10. And I’ll talk about this a little further once we get on the flow step. So if we go into flow, you’ll see that the structure really hasn’t changed. But one thing that has changed, which we really can’t see is the type of score. So my.decree score is no activity. Now, if we go back to the token menu, and we go see decrease score no activity is minus 10, you’ll see that it’s different from the rest of the scores, right, because we’re using a different operator, minus versus plus. And in this case, if someone’s eligible for that campaign, we’re gonna take away 10 from their score.

And so that becomes important because now we know that anyone that we’re essentially subtracted from the score as greater than 10, we know that we’re not going to set people below zero. And that is a possibility within Marketo. And that’s something I’ve definitely seen in customers instances is that they have a score decay in place, but it’s not managed to have a reset or guardrails to make sure it doesn’t go under zero. And sometimes there’s leads that literally go to like negative 500. And so by having this behavior score greater than 10, ensure that it’s at least 10, we won’t run into that issue. And no one’s gonna fall behind zero. Now, why would that be an issue if they go below zero or somewhere to negative 500? We’re essentially setting that person back much further than they actually need to be, which means they have to climb and do more actions to actually become a viable prospect, right? Now the next campaign we’ll walk through is the demographic. And so let’s go through and open every single folder.

And so with demographic, this is more so the people that you want to do business with. It’s based off of demographic and firmographic information. And so this is not happening as often as a behavior score. It’s happening usually one and done. So one of the campaigns I wanna walk through that I think is really cool is something like job title. This is a pretty common data field that’s collected first party. And so for the smart list, we’ll see that it’s pretty vague. We just want to look at everyone that actually has a job title. So job title is not empty. And then the fun part is in the flow step. So this is where it definitely looks way different. So the overall structure hasn’t really changed. There’s still two flow steps for change score.

But you can see within the actual flow steps itself, it becomes a little more complex. And so in each choice, we’re essentially building out tiers for the type of job titles that are available within our database. So if job title contains high value, mid value, or low value, they’re going to get different tiered scores to help them push them down the funnel. Now, this high value title is just a placeholder. This is something where the business needs to define what is a high value title, right? This could be CEO, CTO, CMO. Mid value could be director, senior manager. This could be manager. Those are values you’ll need to discuss with the marketing ops and sales team to define. Again, we’ll see the same thing from a behavioral standpoint, or sorry, a demographic standpoint, where we’re just going to also independently score that so that we can see both sides. Now, what are the actual values of these? I’ll go into the scoring menu for the demographic side. And we could see that not only for job title, but for different demographic values, we’re also adding tiers. But for job title high, we’re adding plus 15, for low, plus five, and then for mid, plus 10.

Now, all of this is a great start. And once you import this in, the most important part is to take the time to one, understand it, play around with it, and then also play around with it once it launches. But importing this in is going to be a great start if you don’t have anything, or if you want to get a refresh to align things to best practice.

And so with that, we’ll start walking into the key takeaways. So, scoring helps prioritize their efforts, right? Not only from a marketing standpoint to show all of the great things marketing is doing to help push these people to sales, but now sales actually has data that they can use to make data-informed decisions.

Remember, demographic scores identify who you want to do business with, whereas behavior scores help identify who wants to do business with you. And in most cases, we’re going to want to weigh more on the behavioral aspect, because those are actions that people are truly taking to get to us.

And the most important, so last but definitely not least, is scoring is not set and forget it. As much as I wish it could be, and I wish it could be automated and AI-driven and have everything in between, where we’re at is it needs to be living and breathing and treated like a living and breathing object.

Once you launch it, you should take the first three months to really pulse in and start understanding and seeing what leads are coming through, having a feedback loop with sales to see, are the leads we’re sending over actually valuable? Are they converting? And from there, remembering that you can’t just let it go, because everything around us is changing, right? Technology is always changing, people are always changing, trends are always changing.

But with that, we’ll start moving into upcoming customer events. I’d like to call out that there are so many resources that are at our fingertips. We have Experience League with all of our formal documentation on everything Marketo. We also have Marketo Nation, where there’s an amazing community to help you answer your questions and learn more about Marketo. And then there’s also us here at Adobe. So if there’s anything you need, please reach out to VSM’s or message us on LinkedIn. And now we’ll run over to Alana for upcoming customer events. Awesome, thanks Kelvin. Thank you Kelvin and Cynthia for a great presentation and demo. And as a reminder, this is being recorded so you can watch all of that demonstration back at your own pace at a later time. And we will also follow up with links to a bunch of those resources that Kelvin just mentioned. So before we jump into Q&A, I’d like to quickly go over a couple of our upcoming events, starting with commerce and coffee. I mentioned this event at the beginning of our webinar, and while it is geared more for our commerce customers as Adobe customers, all are welcome to our customer exclusive events. So if you’d like to learn more about Adobe Commerce or hear more about pairing for this upcoming peak season, you can join us on October 20th, as Corey Gelato, our senior commerce strategy consultant, discusses strategies for preparing a digital storefront for any business’s peak season. And then looking ahead to November, we will host our next TX quarterly. And at this event, you’ll hear from leadership about what you can expect from Adobe’s Digital Experience products in 2023. So the details for that one will be coming soon, but it will be held in early November, so keep an eye out for invitations in your inbox coming soon. So with that, I think we’re ready for Q&A, and I definitely saw a lot of questions coming in during the presentation. I know Cynthia and Kelvin were trying to answer as many of those as possible. We pulled a couple from the registration where everybody asked questions when they registered, so we’ll start with some of those. So I’m going to just start diving into those, and Kelvin and Cynthia, when you have a response, please jump in. So first question is, what are the biggest missteps that professionals make when developing and executing a lead scoring model? I can take that one. So the first thing was what we talked about in the key takeaways, which is not treating it like a living and breathing model, so setting it and then forgetting it.

It’s just one of those things that you need to play around with because there isn’t a golden standard for how a scoring model should be set. Different businesses have different sales life cycles, different customers, which means different trends. So making sure to really keep an eye on it in iterating and getting feedback. The second thing is not creating a feedback loop with sales. So building this in a silo from a marketing standpoint is just going to hurt us. We want to make sure that we have input from all stakeholders, especially when we’re first implementing this. Once we actually build out, define our scores, we need to actually get feedback from sales about what they think those scores should be and what else we should be scoring on, as well as when we launch the actual program, are these leads actually valuable? So once they hit that threshold that Cynthia mentioned, the MQL gets sent to sales, are they converting? So one thing we always recommend is in the beginning, have a monthly cadence with sales and essentially look at leads. Take 10 leads, see where they’re at, where those valuable do the scores work if they don’t iterate. Either do we need to add more to the actions we’re taking or do we need to subtract from the actions we’re taking? I can also add to that.

I can also add to that. I think it’s also oftentimes we see marketing or even sales team, they are making assumptions on, oh, what is the ideal prospect or likelihood to convert, but they don’t look at their actual data. You think, oh, is someone just click on our email, we’ll convert, but do you have data to back up so far a lot of your email, your email engagement is actually converting. You really want to look at your existing data set. And again, this is what differ from company to company because it’s your own data. You want to make sure you have data to back up any assumptions on how a lead scoring model should be. Typically when we work with customer, our recommendation is that once you kind of put together a raw lead scoring model that you have, take your top 10 leads from last month and then run them through your lead scoring model to see if they actually reach your threshold that you set in, that you pre-assume on your model. So that is how kind of before, even before your launch, you could kind of be able to have that run through to kind of test proof the model that you’re about to use. Awesome. Thank you guys both for your input on that one. All right, I’m going to keep going. How to address lead scoring with bot activities. I think we touched on that in the Q&A pod, but either Kelvin or Cynthia, if you want to jump in a little bit. I can take that. So bot activities are obviously a huge issue. Being able to track data that’s truly people has been able to track data that’s truly people has become increasingly hard to do. And actually in the past year, Adobe has released a feature within Marketo engaged, which allows us to start logging bot activity. So I’ll actually show that really quick over here. So in the admin section, we all should have the ability to go in and see the bot activity. And so you want to make sure that you have these flipped on and essentially for logging them. And then if you don’t have this already within your instance, please reach out to your VSM or support and we can get that in there, but this should already be placed in. And then from a filtering standpoint for scoring itself, we’ll go to market activities. And there’s actually a constraint that you could build in to your campaigns. Let me go to interactions where we start adding in a specific bot activity. So is bot activity. Apart and we want to say that it’s false. So that will account for filtering out those bot clicks or anything in between so that we can start having a little more trust in what’s coming through into our scores.

Calvin, if you wouldn’t mind going back to admin, I want to just call one thing as well. Of course.

So in the bot activity section, so you’ll see two options and there’s like a note on the bottom. So the best practice is that, so if you select filter, that means Marketo will just completely filter it out from your instance. You won’t even see those being locked. So if you do want to be able to see what’s bot, what’s not bot, I would recommend you set it both to lock. That’s it. Thank you. Thanks, Cynthia.

Awesome. Thanks guys. All right, another question for you both. If you inherit an instance that has lead scoring set up, but no process behind it, is it best to just start over? Yeah, I can take this one on us. So this is always a difficult conversation to have and considering the times that we’re in, there is a lot of turnover and churn in teams. And I would say, yes. So if you don’t understand what’s going on or the mechanics of a scoring program, and none of that is tracking with whoever’s building it and leading the strategy for it, it’s better to take the time to start fresh and build a new model. And like we’ve talked about a lot is, it’s living and breathing. So really you’re just doing a refresh as is.

Great. Thank you.

All right, let’s continue on. How does a lead score integrate with CRM or how to use lead scoring when you don’t have an integrated CRM? Great question. I can take that. Yeah, I mean, ideally, if you do have a CRM integration, you could easily expose your scoring fields to CRM. So your sales rep will have visibility into those scores. And even better, if you are leveraging Marketo’s Sales Insight app, you’ll be able to kind of leverage the MSI start and flame, and those are driven by your lead score. And you’ll be able to also kind of communicate with your sales team in a more seamless fashion within the CRM system. And you could also, upon someone hitting a threshold and becoming MQL, you could create a task, send it to, you can create a task from Marketo to your CRM to ask the sales rep to work on them, and you could get feedback from there. If you don’t have an integrated CRM, there’s still a possibility for you to kind of use lead score.

So upon a lead hit threshold will become MQL. Marketo also allows you to send alert to just any email or anybody without having to be integrated with CRM. So there’s definitely a lot of options for you to consider. And really, the key message here is that you want to make sure your lead score is a collaborative effort to market themselves, whether it’s through the CRM or through email location or through some sort of other alert system that you use.

Great, thanks, Cynthia.

All right, I see a bunch more questions.

How do you manage lead scoring when you have two business units in the same Marketo instance? Yeah, you could either have, up to have a global score. We typically recommend as much as possible if you can have a central scoring model that will work for everybody, work for every business unit, and everybody’s happy, then go for it, because less is more. But if you do have to have separate lead score, and as I mentioned, you want to make sure that you set up the lead scoring in a program so you have everything kind of packaged together for one business unit, and another lead scoring model being packaged in another Marketo program for lead scoring for that business unit. And I think kind of the question here is that you want to make sure in your Smart List criteria, you’re making sure you’re finding or filtering or setting your filter to include the audience for that specific business unit. So you want to make sure you have the criteria to identify, hey, how do we identify the audience for business unit one versus business unit two? So that could kind of help you address who’s going to be qualified for your scoring campaign. And you want to make sure you’re looking for the people that is the target audience of your given business unit.

Got it. Thank you, Cynthia. All right, gonna ask a couple more. How often should you update your scoring? Well, I would say as often as it needs tweaking, the factors can change, right? Typically in the early stage, we do recommend reviewing quarterly and make the updates as you see necessary. Over time, I would say like once you get to a point where you can trust your model, the conversion rate is consistent, this update will be less frequent and possibly it’s only like twice a year, or you could kind of, to the point where you just need to review it and just make some tweaks on an annual basis. But really, as soon as you see something’s not working in your list going on, as soon as you see you have any feedback on your team, you should review it.

Okay, great. Good to know. Thank you. All right, gonna keep going here. Can you provide examples of some of the best indicators used in scoring that signal intent or interest? Yeah, you want to look for behavior that exhibits strong intent in a different stage of life cycle. So it’s not just about email click or it’s not just about clicking on the web. You want to pay attention to what on the web are they clicking and what kind of PDF are they downloading? Is that PDF, is it a pricing PDF or is it just kind of general documentation? So for example, at Marketo, we found that there are some behavior that have strong and high correlation with prospects moving into a buying sale cycle with us. So this may include innovating a detailed pricing page, because when they go to pricing, that really show you they are in the later stage of the buying cycle. Maybe they register to watch a detailed product demo. They want to really see how the tool works. And downloading kind of a mid and late stage content, such as how to select market information company. So you want, I mean, it’s not just about action of clicking or consuming content. It is the type of content that they’re consuming that show you the intent of where they are in the buying cycle.

Got it, thank you. All right, keep going. How do you use lead scoring for personalization and segmentation? Oh, that’s gonna be a long strategy discussion. I don’t believe we have enough time to even get into that. But my recommendation is that our Marketo champion, Chiara Reger, she actually done a wonderful presentation that showcase how to leverage the scoring functionality to automate your personalization and segmentation. It is a great presentation. I would highly recommend that you review the recording to get some potential ideas and use cases how you could get creative with scoring and leveraging that functionality. We can include the presentation in the fall email. So you’ll be able to kind of review that. But it is in Adobe website. We have, I think it was during summit when we have the skills change. And it’s up there. We’ll definitely make sure to share a presentation. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. We will provide that in the follow up email. How do you recommend we use lead scoring for upsell and cross-sell? That is a good one. So I would say this going just, it’s kind of a metric to help you understand kind of how much behavior they’re expecting. You could still, I mean, I mean, if existing customer is showing a lot of behavior, a lot of intent for a different product, and they hit the scoring threshold, you could kind of include the notes to, in your sales alert, to let your sales team know that, hey, this person hit the score threshold, and it’s existing customer, because we know it’s existing customer, and the existing customer already has product A, but now they’re expecting a lot of behavior for product B. So this might be our upsell and cross-sell opportunity. So I think the trick here is just identify, it’s not just, okay, anybody over whatever threshold, send it over, but you want to call out, hey, who is hitting the threshold? Are they existing customer? And if they are, are they showing just behavior in the same product they already bought? Maybe they’re just trying to make sure that they’re getting the most out of the purchase, or they are exhibiting behavior in a different product area that we could potentially upsell and cross-sell.

Okay, great. I’m running up at the end of the questions. I hope Kelvin or Cynthia, did you see any other ones in the Q&A pod that we could quickly get to, or should we start to wrap up here? Yeah, there’s one more question that was asked around the threshold going over 100. So inverse to what we were talking about in ensuring that we don’t subtract from a person’s score below zero, there also is a score reset that came in place for people that passed the threshold, and that’s really dependent on the company’s ability to one, leverage cross-sell upsell. And if that’s not in place, then I would say you would want to put in a score reset at 75. So yes, we can let people go over 100, but in most cases, if we don’t have any activities to start tracking for cross-sell or upsell or a specific customer score, we would actually want to reset that score to zero once they hit that threshold. And again, that’s dependent on what happens down the funnel after they’ve MQL’d.

Awesome. Thank you, Kelvin, for jumping in on that. All right, we are at the top of the hour, so I am going to wrap us up quickly and thank everyone for joining us today for our first session of Marketo and MOCAs, and thank you everyone for all of your great questions. We unfortunately did not have a chance to get to all of them. They were popping in real fast there, so please do follow up with your customer success manager if we weren’t able to answer those. And as you’re leaving the session today, you’ll see a quick, brief survey pop up if you wouldn’t mind taking that. For us, it should be less than two minutes to complete. We would really appreciate it.

And as a final reminder, you will receive a recording of today’s event within 24 hours from GoToWebinar, and we will include a bunch of the resources that Kelvin and Cynthia mentioned today. So thank you everyone for joining, and thank you, Cynthia and Kelvin, for the great presentation, and have a great day, everybody.