Lead scoring and sales insights - when would you use one over the other?

Lead Scoring is to assign a score to a lead and help the sales team sort the leads as per the score. This way they can create a priority list. On the other hand, Sales Insight is used for providing more visibility to the Sales Team. Sales Insight can allow the sales team to:
- Send MKTO emails directly from SFDC
- View Lead history and all activity
- Segment leads with Stars and Flames. Usually, Stars are calculated on the basis of the Demographic score, and Flames on the behavior score.
- View Interesting Moments, which pushed a lead through the buyer journey.

Typically, marketers would use both, lead scoring as well as sales insight. You should train your sales team for the same, when they look at a lead in SFDC.

Lead Scoring is the very basics to figure out which leads are worth your time. The higher the (behavior) score, the more active a lead is.

Sales Insights is a way to determine who is the quickest riser (hottest at this very moment) and is therefor reliant on the lead score. On top of that, if your sales team is ready to call the leads up, Sales Insight will give them valuable information on what content the lead interacted with.

Don't use one over the other. Use both.

Hi Jason,

Really good response from @Stijn Heijthuijsen​ above, but since you said you're new to Marketo I wanted to provide a bit more detail:

Lead score can be calculated by behavior (+1 point for visiting a web page, +25 points for downloading a report, whatever), or by a combination of behavior and demographic (e.g. +10 points for a valid email address that does not contain @gmail.com, -10 points for an undesirable/junior job title, etc). In order to do the combination type scoring, I've always kept 2 separate fields for "behavior score" and "demographic score" and then returned the sum of these two values in the "lead score" field. However you end up doing this, the lead score is really just about putting a numeric value on any factors that you think may influence eventual buying behavior. You may find that you need to adjust these over time - that's normal, it just means you're learning more about what activities are most indicative of a good prospect. It's also worth keeping in mind that the order in which events occur may be an important factor. Examples:

• Behavior score: +25 when any report is downloaded
• Demographic score: When a lead is created, +10 if email address does not contain "@hotmail.com"
• Behavior conditional score: If lead A downloads a report, +50 if he has previously downloaded a white paper, but +35 if he has not downloaded a white paper in the past.

A sales insight event is a bit of a different beast because it does not have to be attached to any scoring activity (although many activities that you'll want to attach a score to are also likely candidates for sales insight events. I tend to think of sales insight events as a "highlights reel" of the full lead activity history that you can see in Marketo. A couple of examples here:

a. For a subset of activity type Our sales team doesn't want to see every web page visit for every lead (for us, web page visit earns +1 if it's on our marketing site and +2 for certain pages within our documentation), but they do want to see visits to our pricing page, so I send a sales insight event for a visit to /pricing/

b. Activity type with additional information I assign a score of +50 for downloading any report, and a score of +25 for downloading a datasheet. But to provide more information in sales insights, I send an event for "downloaded content - [name of document], so that sales reps can see which specific report or datasheet each lead has accessed.

c. Non-digital activity When our team goes to a tradeshow, we assign the Program Status "visited booth" to anyone we scan at the event, which has a corresponding behavior score value of +150. However, I also send a custom sales insight milestone for anyone we scanned, structured as "visited booth at [event name MM.YYYY].

If you're just getting started, my recommendation is to get your behavioral scoring set up first, then to use that information as a guide for what you may want to make sales insight events for. And definitely don't be afraid to get some input from your sales team (specifically from SDRs), as they'll likely have very good suggestions for what they want to see.