Pardot: Score vs. Grade, Prospect Scoring and Automated Qualification

Syncing your sales and marketing efforts is critical and, for a lot of organizations, one of the trickiest tasks is determining who to “handoff” from a nurture or trickle campaign into a personalized sales process (and when to trigger that transition). Even if you’re a big enough operation to have a dedicated business development unit qualifying leads and handling pre-sales efforts, it’s still worthwhile to have data-driven insight into exactly how “hot” those pre-pipeline prospects actually are and to automate as much of the screening process as possible, so your team can spend time engaging prospects, not grading them.

Luckily, Pardot makes prospect qualification easy and helps marketing funnel qualified, sales-ready leads right into the pipeline with their scoring and grading tools! But, when it comes to the set up — I get asked one question more than any other: “What’s the difference between a ‘grade’ and a ‘score’ in Pardot?”

So I sat down to make a 5-minute video explaining the difference! I overshot the time a bit, and the result is a 15-minute introduction to Pardot prospect scoring, a breakdown of “score” vs “grade”, a high-level look at how you can implement effective automated qualification to bridge the gap between sales and marketing, and some handy reference tools to help you get started on the right foot!

Give it a watch and, if you really just need a sub-2-minute explanation of “grade vs. score”, feel free to start the video right here:

In short:

• Grade = Characteristics / Traits that make a prospect a good fit for your sales process (Title, Department, HQ Location, Number of Employees, etc…)
• Score = Activities / Engagement that indicate interest in your company, product, or service (Email Opens, Event Registrations, Webinar Attendances, Whitepaper Downloads, etc…)
• Note: Both accept custom fields, so be sure you apply your custom criteria in the right category based on the above)

Now get out there and start screening! And, as always, if you need help getting set up, translating your existing processes into Pardot or Salesforce, or building a brand new internal app from the ground up, drop us a line — we’re here to help.

Until next time, keep working hard, smart, and happy. And we’ll see you in the cloud.