Tips and best practices Still with us? Good! Let’s start to wrap this handbook up by recapping some quick and actionable tips and best practices for implementing Pardot scoring and grading. • Involve the sales team in defining what a sales-ready lead (an MQL • Sense check activity on a regular basis. If you notice a in Pardot’s eyes) actually is - they’ll be the ones receiving the leads! prospect looks quite engaged but all they’ve done is open all • If you don’t have fully developed buyer personas yet, set up a of your emails, perhaps you might want to reduce the score or generic profile where you can pick out information and grade limit it to the first open. based on the data that applies to all of your personas. Things • Consider your key content. The baseline scoring model will like revenue, employee size, job title tend to work quite well for add scores to everything depending on the action taken but a generic profile. You can get more granular with your profiles remember you have the option to increase/decrease scores for when you have more data! each individual action by using completed actions. • Make a plan before you customise any grading or scoring – when • Remember that you can set the reporting date for Scoring you change this it will retrospectively change the grades and scores Categories, so you can, for example, see the engagement with of your current prospect data so you don’t want to do this often. a particular service for 2018 instead of all time. • Write up a plan before implementing any changes as the • Use multiple Profiles and scoring models if your business has updates are retrospective. many different target markets or multiple service/product streams. • Remember that you can use degradation and negative scoring • It is an iterative process! Pardot recommends you audit your to decrease grades and scores - consider how prospects may account once every quarter and revisiting the scoring and decrease over time if inactive. grading is a part of this review. 26 marcloudconsulting.com