Better Lead Scoring = Better Conversations

Show me a sales team that has the spare time to decipher ambiguous MQLs worthy of attention, and I’ll show you a double rainbow. Can it happen? Yes. Does it happen often? Hardly.

Insert: Adobe Marketo Engage lead scoring that goes beyond a basic configuration.

When it comes to Marketo, the power to configure basic lead scoring principles such as ‘one email open’ = ‘one positive lead score’ is easy to do. But, taking the time to go beyond prototypical lead scoring in ways that sharpen conversations between sales and prospects is worth its weight in gold.

Effective Marketo instances act on a wide variety of attributes such as demographic, behavioral, and firmographic data points to build useful MQL (marketing qualified lead) profiles.

Spoiler alert: developing a more advanced Marketo lead scoring schema involves a tango between two; Marketo users that dance with sales personnel to gather inputs that guide how qualified leads should manifest.

Go Beyond Basic Lead Scoring

Evaluating leads merely on metrics such as email clicks or opens inevitably produces pseudo-qualified leads. Here are some of the deeper aspects to Marketo lead scoring one should take into account:

Explicit Versus Implicit Data

Explicit data is information that can dictate lead scoring based upon aspects such as industry, geography, job title, level of decision-making, or specific company. These are relevant, quantifiable data points in which true/falses, yes’/no’s, or clear-cut data points can be defined.

Some advanced explicit factors to consider:

• Does the lead’s job title have access to a measurable budget?
• Do the lead’s geographical characteristics match with how you can offer them a product/service?
• Is the lead’s budget likely to be congruent with your product/service pricing?

On the other hand, implicit data is much more fluid in nature. Implicit data points typically involve interpretations such as product preferences, deliverability needs, or solutions to their problem. Implicit data can even go as far as to measure how content is ingested or which type of content is desired.

Some advanced implicit factors to consider:

• What is the observed readiness to purchase?
• What are the barriers to disseminating product/service information across all stakeholders?
• Is there a specific type of content that resonates with a particular decision-maker?

Active Versus Passive Behavior

For lead scoring, active behavior measures the potential to buy, based upon measurable activities showing sales readiness.

Examples of active behavior:

• Downloaded a sample RFP
• Visited a pricing page
• Watched a product demo video

Passive behavior recognizes the browsing type of engagement activity on a lower scale.

Examples of passive behavior:

• Registered for a webinar
• Viewed home webpage

There becomes a discernable difference between an inquiry of specific prices (active) versus viewing product/service capabilities (passive).

Keeping both behaviors in mind, creating a scoring token system that gives confidence to active versus passive behavior will dictate the fidelity of lead scoring.

Leveling Up Lead Scoring

At times, symbolized lead score leveling can initiate CRM automation to alert the rise or fall of lead scores.

Gather

Marketo users can’t always read the brains of sales. As such, it becomes difficult to gather the climate as to what certifies a lead as ‘sales-ready’. Aggregating said information to disseminate who, what, when, where, and how MQLs onto sales is part and parcel.

Here are some questions that Marketo users can ask that will bridge that gap:

• What data is typically missing that would help the selling process?
• What is the average time in which a lead exists in each stage of the sales cycle?
• Is there specific data that can inform sales of past interactions?
• What purchases were made by the prospect in the past?
• Exactly which past opportunities were missed?

Assign

After an amalgamation of all data points above, it becomes necessary to assign scoring tokens to each. Take the time to implement which scoring tokens are the most important, followed by an iterative evaluation of how they come to fruition in informing sales.

Don’t forget about the importance of negative, or degradation, scoring. Leads can choose an alternative product/service or simply lose interest. Is there potential for recycling? Account accordingly.

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At the conclusion of launching a more advanced lead scoring program, interact with sales to determine results. The act of checking in with sales teams on a continuous basis ensures the evolution of an iterative lead scoring model.

Taking the extra steps to measure and score leads beyond basic measurements will always lead to better conversations between sales and leads.

Seeking help with more advanced lead scoring or something much more complicated? Reach out to the Perficient team to uncover how we can help you and your organization with marketing automation.

Planning For Marketo

In Part One of ‘Planning For Marketo: The Discovery Process’, we posed three sets of hard-hitting questions to ask of your organization in order to plan for resource expenditure to hit the ground running with your new Adobe Marketo instance.

Whether you’re a member of Marketing, Sales, or IT, planning ahead for a new Marketo implementation begins by putting together the minds of all three teams. Typically, it can take months between the time of purchasing Marketo and performing all the necessary steps to prepare for it, all while using a variety of enterprise resources.

So, here are three more critical sets of discovery questions regarding preparation for your Marketo configuration.

Are you familiar with your own high-level enterprise data infrastructure?

Let’s be frank, understanding enterprise data infrastructure is always complex, no matter your role.

Knowing how it all comes together to serve a marketing automation platform, most times, is half of the battle. Planning to address this aspect of data challenges brings about collaboration to diagnose what is apples-to-apples, data-wise, and what is not.

Understanding what data is coming from where will allow you to plan for building webhooks, creating custom fields or custom objects, and testing if an unconventional record key identifier is needed. The more that you take time to configure your data correctly, the more powerful your instance will be.

Do you anticipate your Marketo instance needing to address common data privacy concerns?

Data privacy is especially important if sensitive information should be included, or more importantly, excluded from your new instance. Are any of the following are important to your data?

• Database encryption
• Extended data retention
• Encrypted authentication
• Financial transaction
• HIPAA compliance

One caveat is that Marketo is able to manage some encryption types but not others, meaning that an external database integration may be necessary. Keeping highly sensitive information like financials and health data separate from marketing data can be a scenario to plan for. Will there be concerns about preserving your data for seven years? Will you need to protect personally identifiable information?

If these apply to your organization, plan on taking the steps to protect your customers, leads, or any other types of sensitive data that you should take responsibility for.

Does your organization have experienced Marketo users? If so, how skilled are they?

Many times, organizations can plan for the actual implementation of Marketo, but not account for the level at which their users can apply the technology. The mastery of Marketo can take many years to accomplish. Some find it easier to build those skills within their ranks. Others choose to hire those with Adobe Marketo Expert Certifications.

Either way, it takes many weeks to fully learn how to use Marketo, and hundreds more to become an expert. Even the best configured Marketo instances are only as strong as their user level. Think about conducting training sessions for your user base in congruency with implementing your instance, as to hit the ground running when IP warming concludes.

With all these questions in mind, you and your organization will be able to begin to map out what tasks will need resources, which ones won’t, and how to plan out your path.
Best of luck in hitting the ground running with your new Marketo instance. If your organization needs support with any of the processes detailed above, or something much more complicated, reach out to the Perficient team.

In case you missed Part 1 of ‘Planning For Marketo: The Discovery Process’, click here.

Planning For Marketo

Planning for Marketo sounds like an obvious thing to do. However, getting your ducks in a row when setting out to stand up a new Adobe Marketo Engage instance can be daunting. With Marketo being such a powerful platform that can be configured in countless ways for all types of marketing strategies, it becomes imperative to plan ahead.

Whether you’re a member of Marketing, Sales, or IT, planning ahead for a new Marketo implementation begins by putting together the minds of all three said teams. Typically, it can take months between the time of purchasing Marketo and performing all the necessary steps to prepare for it, all while using a variety of enterprise resources.

Here are three hard-hitting sets of discovery questions to ask of your organization in order to hit the ground running with a new Marketo implementation:

Is your organization currently using another marketing automation platform?

A big part of moving from one marketing automation platform to another is the amount of work that it takes to ensure that branding, targeting, and analytics are not altered or diluted. Seek out ways to document what previous marketing automations have accomplished without losing key deliverables. Define what your goals are in moving to Marketo.

If you do have a marketing automation platform, will you be migrating assets from it?

If your organization has many digital and/or intellectual assets at its disposal, moving them into Marketo should be methodically accounted for. This takes more time than you would think. Look to develop a digital asset inventory approach to ensure that no landing pages, forms, or custom lists are lost. This planning will help ensure that everything can be immediately leveraged once your Marketo instance goes live.

Does your organization have an existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in place to be used directly with Marketo?

If you do have a CRM, how mature is it, and how clean do you believe it to be?

The work towards a clean and actionable CRM tool is a never-ending endeavor. With that said, the fruits of Marketo are only as good as the integrity of the CRM in which it is integrated with. Ahead of implementing a new Marketo instance, it may be necessary to clean and perform deduplication processes on your CRM. Take the time to identify unusable data or even to purge undeliverable email addresses.

If you don’t have a CRM, do you have any sort of data warehouse(s) that stores lead/account data?

Without a CRM, additional processes may be necessary to configure your data store so that Marketo can address things such as duplicative records, real-time data upkeep, or record key identifiers. Furthermore, uncover if there are any siloed data sets that need to be combined with others so that your Marketo instance can have the full data picture.

Marketo is only as powerful as your data is clean, with or without a CRM.

Additionally, do you know how many leads/accounts are in your database(s)?

Adobe offers tiered database license limits for Marketo. Being cognizant of the state of your current database, knowing what could be discarded, and forecasting its future state, is imperative as this knowledge will affect license structure and costs. Not only this, but if you require a dedicated IP, the IP warming process heavily depends on understanding how many leads are available and which ESPs are they are using.

How many distinct channels of information feed your marketing data?

From webinars to PPC ads, and everything in between; gathering data from numerous marketing channels is now expected of marketing teams. With that comes the added responsibilities of configuring said data into a marketable and useable format. It becomes critical to structure marketing data from a wide variety of sources not only for the sake of targeting, but also to normalize it for use across multiple business units. Uncover whether or not data normalization and configuration will need to happen before it is fed to Marketo, while it is in Marketo or a combination of both. With this in mind, take into consideration what marketing data gathering and normalization will look like. Make it known exactly how many business units and personnel it may take to accomplish it.

Best of luck in hitting the ground running with your new Marketo instance. If your organization needs support with any of the processes detailed above, or even something much more complicated, reach out to the Perficient team.

Click here for Part Two of ‘Planning For Marketo: The Discovery Process’.