Marketo - Lead Scoring Question (Fin-tech)

Hi Chris,

We'll need some more information about what your model looks like and what score is pushing it through.  The first glaring thing in my mind, is why are you giving more credence to someone liking subject line or worse mistakenly opening your email as opposed to someone who liked your content so much they clicked a link and are reading even more of your content and engaging with it.

Based on the little information I have, I'd definitely drop opening an email to 10 as a starting point.

How are you doing your demographic scoring? What's an ideal customer look like for you? Is ideal a +10 Demo Score? Or do you have +10 for company size, +10 for job title, +10 for industry combining for +30 Demo score? If the latter, you could be giving too much credence to demographics. I would look at Demographics vs Behaviors. Do you want 75% Behavior Score vs 25% Demo Score? Once you figure that out, you can then take your "ideal" customer and try to build out what that would look like.

Basic Example:

Company YYZ has 75 employees and does $25 million in revenue.

Joe Smith is the CAO

Joe discovers you at a Trade Show

Joe gets scanned and name enters database

Joe opens email

Joe opens up second email and clicks link and goes to Landing Page where he signs up for a webinar

Joe misses webinar but watches the recording

Joe becomes an MQL before Sales takes over and closes the deal. Don't we wish all deals were this simple!

To me, the key things Joe did, he clicked link, he filled out form, he got webinar content. +10 for each
Getting scanned, opening 2 emails is nice to know but certainly not showing a large sign of interest +5 for each

Behavior Score = 45 pts.

Based on this, I would think a 15 pts demo score would balance out nicely. 33% Demo/66% Behavior.

Set MQL at 50 pts. Apply +5 for job title, revenue, company size

Demo Score = 15 pts

Total Score = 60 pts.

That means, anyone who has any of the 3 demo categories will MQL. So someone with the wrong job title, and wrong revenue but has the right employee count would MQL. Does that make sense for your business? I would think so.

That means, if Joe missed your first email, he would still MQL.

It also means, if Joe goes to the Landing Page but doesn't fill out form and so doesn't get the webinar, he won't MQL and you would need to keep nurturing to drive up the score. To me, again I think that sounds idea.

When building out scoring it is best to look at what those that turn out to be clients have done and build around that, but it is also important to look at different scenarios and then running them against your scoring model to see if they meet expected results. Once you have the basics of the model running, you can then really dig into the numbers and try to improve it.

Hi Chris,

It might be good to look at Marketo's own lead scoring practices - Lead Scoring Resources - Marketo as those provide a lot of guidance for new users.

Scoring should be about summing relevant user activity over time. You'll need an understanding of how users interact with the website and content as well as how relevant it is to sales. Setting only two behavioral scoring rules will not give you a true representation of user behviour. Are all emails impactful for sales? Probably not. Same goes with website links - some pages are worth far more in terms of score than others.

Take some time, maybe create a spreadsheet with elements/webpages of the website which are relevant to scoring, identify the threshold which will be used to create an MQL and then implement your scoring campaigns.

You have a long ways to go but @Chris Johnston​ has also provided some great advice.

Hi Chris,

In addition to what was said above which is very good feedback. Think about the customer from the customer's point of view. Ultimately, if I am in fin tech opening an email is rather meaningless. If I review a case study, download a fintech white paper, these things are consuming value added content. Behavior for behavior's sake doesn't help with lead scoring. I recommend sitting down and putting some thought into the customer and their journey. Remember, it is NEVER linear and it could be that certain pieces of content drive conversions.

To fully understand this, I would recommend taking a step back and perhaps consider the following:

• Complete an analysis of tipping point conversion on content if you can
• Sketch out if you were the buyer of fin tech what would be important to you in the purchasing process
• Sketch out idea buyer personas....be careful here as what you think are your ideal buyers may be teams of people
• Do an analysis of your current closed won opportunities to see who is actually buying...why and what were the steps in their journies? Are there correlations?

I know it sounds a little ethereal, but taking the time to do some analysis, can help you craft lead scoring that actually is meaningful.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

Kimberly