Adobe’s Marketo platform helps you get measurable results from acquisition to advocacy, all while keeping customers engaged. Marketo allows you to send emails, build landing pages and, most importantly, look at data so client journeys can be customized.
Specifically, Marketo’s lead scoring tools allow you to build out the customer journeys from when they first appear in your database all the way to close. Through personalized campaigns, the scoring strategies help you attract, nurture, and deliver on win-ready leads.
Lead scoring is the methodology for ranking leads in order of sales-readiness. It saves time and helps companies focus on high-quality leads that have a better chance of converting through to a sale. Once a lead scoring method has filtered relevant leads, companies can customize their communication approach to meet the needs of the customer, further moving them toward a sale.
Lead scoring is typically divided into two segments: demographic scoring and behavioral scoring. Demographic scoring is anything that exists in your data that has to do with who your customer is. This could be company size, company name, industry, job title, or country — the list can be infinite. Behavioral scoring includes things like filling out a form, browsing a website, event attendance, and other similar actions. Demographic and behavioral components work together to create a lead score for each particular customer.
Although there are plenty of platforms that have lead scoring capabilities, Marketo far surpasses competitors in various ways. Marketo offers flexibility in terms of lead scoring — compared to other platforms where you’re often married to the lead scoring method.
One of the benefits of Marketo is unlimited scoring fields. You aren’t locked into scoring only the things that your platform wants you to score. You can customize scoring fields on any data point or behavioral action, giving you the opportunity to pinpoint more relevant leads specific to your company.
Some of the more advanced strategies Marketo offers are lead scoring A/B testing, product-specific lead scores, negative lead scoring, and the ability to run lead scoring on your own schedule.
Marketo has a long list of benefits, but building your scoring model still comes with challenges.
When you’re putting a scoring model into place, one of the biggest challenges is determining what you will score. You want to collect relevant information, but you don’t want a 20-question form to identify your ideal customer profiles. Many companies solve this through enrichment tools that help you collect extra data.
Another challenge is getting buy-in from your team on a cohesive strategy. You should ensure that both your sales team and demand generation team have a voice, but you still need the leadership team to drive decisions at the end of the day. To find a good balance between conflicting voices, you can take feedback from all teams, build two different models, and see which one is more successful for your company.
Regardless of how well your scoring model is running, you want to check in from time to time and see if it needs updating. And you want to look at this from both a process and an organic standpoint. You should be in the loop with your teams and have consistent meetings, getting their feedback on what’s working and what’s not working. On the process side, revisiting your model every quarter can be helpful to ensure that you’re hitting opportunity goals as well as marketing qualified lead goals.
