Pardot Lead Scoring: The Ultimate Lead Scoring Guide

In 2012, Salesforce acquired Pardot, one of the leading marketing automation solutions worldwide. Since then, Salesforce Pardot has helped businesses create targeted marketing campaigns and boost their revenues.

Pardot is known for its lead-scoring features. It allows your sales reps to analyze your lead responses and nurture them accordingly. Pardot automates lead management by giving specific scores to your leads, allowing your sales team to focus only on the most important prospects.

Before understanding Pardot lead scoring, let us briefly understand the marketing automation solution.

What Is Salesforce Pardot?

Salesforce Pardot is a powerful leads development and marketing automation platform. It helps businesses create targeted marketing campaigns and leverage email-based sales. Pardot prevents your sales reps from performing manual processes by automating multiple sales processes.

It provides users with an intuitive and simple UI, making it easier for marketers to obtain valuable insights into their customers’/prospects’ behavior. With Salesforce Pardot, you can monitor the entire customer journey while considering actions like website visits, clicks, email views, lead forms, etc. These details help you personalize your marketing campaigns and let your sales reps reach the right person at the right time.

Pardot also helps you segment your target audience according to factors like needs, preferences, behaviors, and more. It helps you follow a focused approach while dealing with your prospects. The marketing automation tool allows your marketing and sales reps to target your customers through personalized and dynamic tools like landing pages, ads, personalized offers, and more.

What Is Pardot Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is one of Pardot’s highlight features. Gone are the days when marketing and sales teams would rely on manual lead assessment to see how effective a lead is. Pardot automates the lead scoring process to enhance your sales and marketing processes.

Pardot lead scoring helps you track your engagement with every prospect and analyze every lead based on their behavior. When you acquire a lead, the tool checks its response to analyze the prospect’s level of interest. It prompts you to nurture a lead the prospect shows an active interest in engaging with your organization. If not, you can move on to the more interested prospects and nurture the others later.

Salesforce Pardot allows users to set a threshold value for their lead scores. This threshold acts as a benchmark for the leads to qualify. It is similar to passing a test by scoring above a certain grade. Once captured, your marketing team first qualifies the leads. These marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) are then sent to the sale team for conversion.

Pardot simplifies the lead scoring system and allows your team members to implement a seamless mechanism in their marketing workflow.

Default Pardot Lead Scoring Metrics

The moment a visitor lands on your website, Salesforce Pardot starts tracking their behavior. Every new visitor is counted as a new lead generated from a specific source. It uses browser cookies to track these actions and scores your leads accordingly.

The marketing automation tool uses its default score approach to track specific user actions and assigns a specific score to every prospect.

Here are the major default scores given by Pardot to your leads based on specific actions:

•                    Event registered – 50 points

•                    Custom redirect click – 0 points

•                    Email opened – 0 points

•                    Event checked in – 0 points

•                    Form error – -5 points

•                    Form handler error – -5 points

•                    File access – 3 points

•                    Form handler submission – 50 points

•                    Form submission – 50 points

•                    Landing page error – -5 points

•                    Landing page success – 50 points

•                    Opportunity created – 50 points

•                    Opportunity lost – -100 points

Let’s understand this with an example. If a lead fills in and submits a form on your website, Pardot will give it a default score of 50 points. This event implies that your prospect has shown active interest in engaging with your business by giving you their contact details.

Creating A Pardot Lead Scoring Strategy

Pardot lets you create a lead-scoring strategy to nurture your leads effectively. Before you create this strategy, ensure that you set a threshold where a prospect turns into a marketing-qualified lead (MQL). This threshold depends on your business needs and objectives.

Here are some of the most important features you should configure as you create a Pardot lead-scoring strategy:

Pardot Scoring Rules

These are the rules that represent the basic guide Pardot follows to classify your visitor’s behavior as they land on your website. While a default scoring scheme is present, as discussed earlier, there may be situations where you need to make adjustments.

To configure your Pardot lead scoring rules, follow these simple steps:

•      Click on “Admin” after logging in.

•      Go to the drop-down menu and click on “Automation Settings.”

•      Click on “Scoring.”

•      Select “Edit Scoring Rules.”

Automation Rules

Automation rules help you adjust your lead scores to tell an asset with a weaker or stronger intent apart from other assets. For this, follow these simple steps:

•      Go to the “Automaton Rules” page

•      Select “Add Automation Rules.”

Pardot lets you choose between two match types available on the Automation page – Match All and Match Any. They help you create new automation and create your Pardot lead scoring strategy.

Match All provides you with the “AND” functionality, which means that your lead must fulfill all criteria for Pardot to take necessary action. On the other hand, Match Any provides you with the “OR” functionality, which means that Pardot will take necessary actions even if your lead satisfies a single condition.

Completion Actions

Pardot also helps you configure completion actions to create a robust lead-scoring strategy. To do so, follow these simple steps:

•      Go to the Marketing section and select Forms

•      Now, select the name of the form you want to add the completion actions for

•      If you have an existing form, you can simply select the “Edit Form” option in the top-right corner

•      Keep on selecting the “Next” option until you reach Completion Actions

•      Once you create your completion actions, click on “Confirm and Save” to end the process

List Uploads

If you want to import your existing leads data into your Pardot lists, you can automatically configure Pardot lead scoring during the import. This is useful, especially while making a prospects list for an event or if you already have a list of prospects who have shown interest in your offerings.

Here are the steps you should follow to import your prospects list to Pardot:

•      Go to the Prospect Import page in Pardot

•      Select “Import” and click on the “Upload File” option

•      Select the CSV(s) you want to add

Manual Lead Score Updates

No matter how easy Pardot makes lead management for you, you may encounter situations where manual changes are needed to update a lead score.

Here are the simple steps you should follow to update your Pardot lead scores manually:

•      Go to the Overview page for the concerned prospect

•      Select “Edit,” located at the top-right corner to configure current prospects (you can directly go to the Score field to adjust new prospects)

The Final Word

These were some of the key aspects to consider while scoring your leads using Pardot. Pardot makes lead management easier and more effective, allowing your marketing and sales teams to nurture quality leads. Automated lead scoring saves the time and efforts your teams would otherwise spend while dealing with your prospects.