Get Started with Lead Grading

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Explain grading.
  
• Describe the default profile.
  
• Create a custom profile.
  
• Apply a profile with automation rules.
  

Grade Your Leads

Scoring is great, but it’s only part of the lead qualification equation. Just because a lead is active and interested in you doesn’t mean they’re a good fit for your business. You also want to check how well your leads match your ideal customer profile.

Account Engagement assigns a letter grade to leads. A lead can earn anywhere from an F to an A+ ranging from worst to best. All prospects are assigned with a grade of D, and then their grade can increase or decrease based on how well they fit your ideal customer profile. Unlike scores that are based on implicit factors, grades are based on explicit factors and information leads supply about themselves. Most importantly, grades help align sales and marketing on the quality of their leads.

Default Profiles

All Account Engagement accounts come with a default profile that measures leads against five criteria.

• Company size (2/3 letter grade)
  
• Industry (2/3 letter grade)
  
• Location (2/3 letter grade)
  
• Job title (2/3 letter grade)
  
• Department (2/3 letter grade)
  

All prospects are assigned the default profile upon creation. Since the default profile is already applied to every prospect, it’s a good idea to edit the default profile to match your ideal prospect profile.

Remember Lueng from Get Cloudy? Get Cloudy Consulting is a high-tech consulting firm that specializes in CRM implementations. Lueng is its marketing manager, and has been tasked with working with Alan, the sales manager, to create some grading criteria for Get Cloudy.

Here’s Leung’s grading criteria.

And here’s Alan’s criteria.

Once they agree on the grading criteria, they adjust the default profile to make sure all of their criteria is represented.

1. Navigate to Prospects | Segmentation | Profiles.
   
2. Select theicon for the default profile.
   
3. Click Edit.
   
4. Adjust the grade weights (⅓, ⅔, 1) in the default profile to reflect the following:
   
   1. Adjust Company Size weight to 2/3 letter.
      
   2. Delete the Location criteria.
      
   3. Change Job Title weight to 1.
      
   4. Leave Department weight at ⅔
      
   5. Change Industry weight to 1.
      
5. Select Save profile.
   

Create a Custom Profile

Lueng has seen success by applying the default profile to her general audience. But she decides to build a custom profile to target Get Cloudy’s partner audience and grade them separately on different metrics. After meeting with Alan and hearing from the Get Cloudy sales team, Lueng is ready to build the Get Cloudy custom partner profile.

The most important part of the custom partner profile is the potential partner’s area of expertise. Right now, Get Cloudy is focused on recruiting Marketing Cloud partners, so Lueng builds a profile around the custom field Salesforce Cloud Experience. Before she builds the profile she needs to create the custom field first. In this case, she makes a Salesforce Cloud Experience custom field.

1. Navigate to Account Engagement Settings | Object and Field Configuration | Prospect Fields.
   
2. Click +Add Custom Field.
   
3. Enter Salesforce Cloud Experience for the name.
   
4. Select the salesforce.com Field Name it should map to.
   
5. Click Create Custom Field.
   

Lueng is now ready to create the custom profile for Marketing Cloud.

1. Navigate to Prospects | Segmentation | Profiles.
   
2. Select +Add Profile.
   
3. Enter Marketing Cloud Profile as the name.
   
4. Enter Salesforce Cloud Experience - Marketing Cloud in the criteria field.
   
5. Select a grade adjustment of 1.
   
6. Select Create Profile.
   

Great! The custom Marketing Cloud profile is now ready. Next, Lueng creates an automation rule that searches for people she wants to add to the Marketing Cloud profile. Remember that every prospect in Account Engagement is automatically assigned to the default profile. Lueng needs to move matching leads from the default profile over to her new Marketing Cloud profile with an automation rule.

1. Navigate to Automations | Automation Rules.
   
2. Select +Add Automation Rules.
   
3. Enter Marketing Cloud Profile Match as the name.
   
4. Under Rules, select Match all.
   
5. Select +Add new rule.
   
6. Enter Prospect custom field :: Salesforce Cloud Experience :: is :: Marketing Cloud.
   
7. Select +Add new action.
   
8. Enter Change prospect profile :: Marketing Cloud Profile.
   
9. Select +Add new action.
   
10. Enter Change profile criteria :: Marketing Cloud Profile:: Salesforce Cloud Experience :: Matches.
    
11. Select Create automation rules.
    

Awesome! Lueng is now ready to grade her prospects database against their Marketing Cloud experience to better determine if interested leads would be a good fit as a Get Cloudy partner.

This same thought process can apply to each area of interest for implementation that Get Cloudy wants to focus on, such as Service Cloud or Sales Cloud. To do that, Lueng would just follow the above steps to create a new custom profile for Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and so on. Then she would create an automation rule that would search for people she’d like to add to the appropriate Cloud profile.

Great work! Now you know that grading is the second piece of the lead qualification puzzle and assesses how interested your business should be in a lead. You know how to adjust the default grading profile, and you know how to create a custom profile to identify leads that are ideal for a specific service or feature your business offers.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Grading Prospects
  
• Salesforce Help: Using Profiles to Grade Prospects
  
• Salesforce Help: Guidelines for Grading Prospects