Here we take a brief look at what Pardot offers in its Pardot lead scoring system. We shall also take a look at the pros and cons of this lead management system. Pardot is a B2B marketing automation tool. ExactTarget acquired Pardot in 2012 for USD 96 million. Subsequently, Salesforce acquired ExactTarget in 2013.
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What is Lead scoring?
A lead is a potential target customer who may get converted into a customer. A lead scoring system helps rank the potential leads based on their propensity to get converted. Usually, the objective of lead management is to convert the leads into sales. However, sales are not the only expected outcome for all cases. The objective may make people sign up for a free account. Now, let us look at an example to illustrate the concept. This is a raw and hypothetical example to explain the concept. Multiple attributes, behavioral data points, and demographics are used in modern lead scoring systems.
For example: let us consider the case of Spotify, the music streaming service. Let us say that a person searches for a song on Google and it shows them the link for the song on Spotify. Once they land on the page, they become potential customers of Spotify premium. A tracking cookie keeps a track of their activity on the page. Furthermore, if the person visits the page again from search, link, social media, etc their chances of conversion increase. Let us say they play a curated playlist for 30 mins. Their chances of becoming a Spotify Premium user increases even more. Now, let us consider that you want to run an ad for Spotify Premium. You would rather spend the ad money on the prospects that have higher chances of buying the subscription than bombarding ten different people.
Key features of Pardot Lead Scoring
- Focus on B2B lead scoring – Salesforce (the parent company) focuses on B2C while Pardot is for B2B.
- Pardot is a focused service for lead management on the other hand Salesforce is a comprehensive customer relationship management suite.
- Default scoring system – this is the basic lead scoring that monitors the leads that get converted into sales and then updates the model. Newer leads are then given a score based on their behavior.
- Pardot allows users to segregate interaction across different products or businesses. This helps create a different score depending on the specific case for the product.
- Updating scoring rules – the scoring rules can be updated by adjusting the automation rules.
- Integrated lead management – the users can nurture leads through different channels such as web form, landing page, search engine, social media and news letters.
Pardot grading automation
Salesforces Pardot provides Pardot grading automation as a lead nurturing tool. Many of the leads do not get converted. Lead nurturing helps marketers in reducing these dropouts. One of the common ways to segregate leads is based on their recency of interaction. A lead that has recently interacted with a firm is called a ‘hot lead.’ On the other hand, a lead that has interacted with our firm earlier but not recently is a ‘cold lead.’ Statistically, the hot leads have higher chances of conversion. Pardot’s automated grading system helps in increasing the conversion rate of these leads by identifying high-quality cold leads as well. Automation tools can even connect with these leads and send out an email with upcoming sales or share the company’s latest news with them.
Another advantage of automating the Pardot lead scoring system is that it is much faster compared to manual lead nurturing. As soon as cold lead’s behavior suggests that they have higher chances of conversion, they can be nurtured. This is almost real-time and helps in increasing sales. For instance, you find that Thinkpads are more popular among managers and business professionals. In that case, you shall have a higher propensity to purchase Thinkpads from leads that are coming from such professionals.
Einstein lead scoring from Pardot
Pardot Einstein is an artificial intelligence-based lead nurturing platform. The Einstein lead scoring from Pardot offers a data-driven method to generate the lead scores. This feature is not enabled by default in Pardot. However, you can enable it inside the settings in your Salesforce dashboard. However, Einstein is available only in the Advanced and Premium plans. Other Pardot Pricing tiers like Growth and Plus do not have this feature.
Some of the key features of Einstein lead scoring system are:
- Automatic generation of the lead score.
- The score calculation also takes into account the user engagement data.
- A separate Einstein behavior scoring dashboard is provided.
- It also includes Einstein Attribution. This also helps in multitouch attribution analysis.