Automate Lead Qualification in Pardot Lightning App

Learning Objectives

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

• Describe thresholds for scoring and grading.
• Understand how to automate sales assignments based on a prospect meeting the lead qualification model.

Five Yard Line: Determine What Score and Grade Is Significant

When setting up your lead qualification model, an important step is to set your score and grade thresholds for prospects. This means that for grades, you identify a minimum letter grade that you want qualified prospects to have, and for score, a minimum point value. This score and grade threshold then allow your marketing team to determine if a prospect is properly qualified and is now ready to be sent on to sales. 

Determining the appropriate score and grade threshold varies for everyone based on your industry, company goals, sales needs, and other criteria. It’s impossible to advise a universal score and grade threshold that work for every company, but there are some good rules of thumb to consider. 

• Start with a score threshold of 100 points. This is a good minimum score, and you can always adjust this up or down based on feedback from your team.
• Start with a grade threshold of B-. Again, this is a starting point. Monitor the prospects you’re sending to sales and adjust this threshold up or down using their feedback.

Much like turning a radio dial, finding the right threshold is a matter of slowly adjusting in increments until you find the right frequency. It’s a great idea to set a calendar reminder to review every 30 days for a bit to see how everything is working. 

Don’t forget that you continue to nurture prospects in Pardot until they meet your thresholds. The ultimate lead qualification goal is to maximize the number of prospects who become qualified: product education, expectation setting, and compelling content all play a large role in reaching this goal. 

Touchdown: Pass the Qualified Prospects to Sales

Now that Leung has set up a lead qualification model and has automated both scoring and grading across her Pardot account, the next step is to send those qualified prospects over to Alan and his sales team for them to close the deal. 

Leung and Alan have worked together to set the initial lead qualification threshold for Get Cloudy. In order for a prospect to be considered qualified, they must have at least a score of 100  points and a grade of B+. 

Let’s use this information to build an automation rule that assigns prospects that meet this threshold over to the sales team. 

1. Navigate to Automations | Automation Rules.
2. Click +Add Automation Rules.
3. EnterQualified Leads Assignment.
4. Under Rules, select Match all.
5. Click +Add new rule.
6. Enter Prospect score::greater than or equal to ::100.
7. Click +Add new rule.
8. Enter Prospect grade::greater than or equal to ::B+.
9. Click +Add new action.
10. Select Assign prospect via salesforce.com active assignment rule.
11. Click Create automation rules.

This automation rule runs continuously and sends qualified prospects to Salesforce to be assigned out to the Get Cloudy sales team for follow up. Efficient and easy!