Lead scoring is a necessary and important part of automation, yet it too often operates in the background or is hastily prepared during an implementation.

Lead scoring should be an active process where you continually evaluate scoring thresholds, new behaviors, and where the lead ultimately ends up: Win or Loss. Once you have your initial system in place, all that back testing becomes easy. So how do you begin to build a scoring system? How do you know what to score?

The Scoring System to Build Sales-Marketing Harmony

You could build it yourself which would be fast in the short run. You will hear from Sales about “unqualified leads.” Instead, work with sales to build a more scientific system to help them see only sales ready leads. You can do this in three ways:

• Option 1: Dictate: You and the Sales VP decide. It’s fast, authoritative, but limited. Definite questions from front line sales.
• Option 2: The Focus Group: You and the top sales and marketing people decide. Slower, but possibly flawed, requiring changes in the future.
• Option 3: The Survey: You survey the entire sales team and analyze the relative ranks of individual demographics and behaviors. Scientific, slower, fewer changes in the future.

I like Option 3 the best. You can use the first two for information, then build the survey.

Instead of basing your lead scores on what you think you know, just ask your sales team!

You should use their relative rankings, especially of behaviors, as a basis for the scores you put into Marketo. Once complete, you should back test scores against Won and Lost opportunity data if possible.

The survey is designed to elicit Sales’ relative ranking of individual demographics and behaviors to program into the lead scoring system. The idea behind the “likelihood to call ranking” is to discover how excited each sales person in your firm is to call an organization, title, department, function, etc.… based entirely on a single criteria.

I want to point out that you should include positive and negative demographics and behaviors because you will program both into Marketo. Some negative behaviors may not be as negative as you think for the Sales team. Sales will also rank both so you have a full spectrum from the worst leads to avoid to the best leads to pass on. If you want to achieve sales-marketing harmony, then listen to what Sales says.

Here’s my Lead Scoring Survey Template. [pdf] and when you’re ready, the Lead Scoring Planning Tool [xlsx]

Lead scoring in automation can only help you on a single criterion at a time. How you weight those actions or criteria determines the total lead score at any given time. Marketo’s >Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring can help you further.

P.S. Remember to sign up for the latest updates on the Marketing Rockstar’s Guide to Marketo newsletter. – Josh

Image: Flickr Drew Stephens

In preparing my first internal guide for Marketo, I started a set of checklists for our team to be sure we did not miss a step in running emails, newsletters, webinars, etc…

After working with other firms, I decided to update these checklists to be more generic while allowing you to adjust them for your business. Feel free to download them and use them at your firm.

Marketo Marketing Checklists [docx will download]

Marketing automation tools like Marketo can help you monitor your deliverability and list health over time. Of course, you may want to download all that data into a helpful Excel sheet.

Here is a sample report you can use to get started.

There’s much more email reputation management detail in the upcoming Marketing Rockstar’s Guide to Marketo, so stay tuned.

Need a global list of personal email address domains so you can filter them out of your lead flow?

Here you are: [xlsx] [csv]
(it’s nearly 1,000 domains, but use at your own discretion. I make no guarantees on this).

As a bonus, there are a few extras such as Spam Traps names.

Remember to do a few things with this list:

• Run a campaign to blacklist Spam Traps and to do so any time a lead is created. Spam trap emails are taking up space in your database as well as risking your email IP reputation. Use Black List = True in the Flow.

• Decide how to handle personal email domains.
  • Will you deduct from their Lead Score?
  • Will you hold these records until they meet other criteria?
  • Will you market to them differently?

Many people use personal domains when they aren’t sure about a company’s content quality. Or they don’t want to clutter their work inbox. Just because someone filled in their gmail.com address doesn’t mean they aren’t qualified. In fact, they may have filled in all the demographic detail you love. So be careful in how you score and handle these records.

• How will you handle *.edu emails? Or *.gov records?

If your company has services for these two verticals, then you’ll need to continue scoring and sorting by demographics. If you do not work with academia at all, you still might consider nurturing Students and Professors if it won’t impact your database count. Today’s students could be tomorrow’s buyers.

[update: 9/6/13: add me.com, mac.com, and outlook.com to this list!]

Happy demand generating!

Here’s a template for a simple subscription management system using Salesforce.com and Marketo.

Ultimately how you do this is based on your business, your audience, and what messaging you think they will want.

Step 1: Establish privacy rules internally as well as in compliance with CANSPAM and other local laws.

Step 2: Translate these rules into standard operating procedures for staff (Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing) and place these rules into your CRM.

Step 3: In your CRM, Create checkbox fields or Yes/No/Blank picklists corresponding to each channel, topic, or newsletter you intend to offer.

For example, Newsletter 1=T/F; Webinar Invitations=T/F and so on.

I prefer human readable fields using the Yes/No/Blank option in Salesforce. If you use this field option, your label can say “Newsletter Subscription: Yes” so it is clear to everyone.

Some marketers recommend offering Topics rather than specific emails or channels. That’s up to you. Personally, I like to know what I’m signing up for, so a Topic choice is less appealing. I’d much rather sign up for “Webinar Invitations” or “Special Events” than a topic on “China” because I’m not sure what I will get with “China.”

Step 4: Create corresponding SFDC Campaigns to each checkbox. Then add Member Status=Opted In/Opted Out with both set to Responded. Remove the other options. (Keep in mind you could create a Channel Tag called Subscriptions with similar progression statuses. Then you can control a Lead’s preferences using a Program.

Step 5: Create a Form called “Subscription Preferences” adding the fields from Step 3 with clear Labels. If you’re planning a more complicated system such as what Marketo built, you will need a web programmer who can use javascript and jquery.

Step 6: Create a page named “Subscription Management” with the SEO friendly page name on its URL: “subscription-management”. Add the Form you made from Step 5. Here’s where your web programmer will need to do the fancy javascript and jQuery if you want to do things like pre-fill the person’s email from the Unsubscribe link, or add many options with special formatting.

I believe this link should be available from your Privacy page as well as from your email unsubscribe link. Make life easy for people; let people sign up as they please or you risk nasty emails and FTC complaints which could have been avoided.

Write clear copy explaining what the Lead can expect from each channel. For instance “Newsletter” is not as good as “Economics Newsletter Delivered Each Thursday”. Many recommend copy encouraging the Lead to stay on the lists.

You can also add a “throttle option” that enables Marketing Suspended for a period of time; or alternately, restricts the number and frequency of emails from your company.

Restricting the frequency or number of emails is a little harder to manage on the backend. For instance, at EIU, the company policy was to send no more than 2 promotional emails per month (this excluded opted-in content). To do this properly would require a clear naming scheme or counting system in the database.

Step 7: create one or more workflows which are triggered by a Fills Out Form on this page. If someone changes their Newsletter flag to “Yes” then the Change Campaign Member Status changes to “Opted-In” while changing Webinar Invitation to “No” changes their Member Status to “Opted-Out”.

Step 8: Setup standard Smart Lists based on the Opted-In/Out member status for each channel. Train your team to use these lists as part of their targeting efforts. Remember you can nest these lists with your Segmentations or Geographic lists.

Step 9: test this. A lot.

Step 10: Migrate your records to the new system using Marketo flow actions.

For instance if your previous system simply had Unsubscribe=True/False then you will need to invite your database to opt-in to each channel. (This is the only legal option).

If you had an existing series of fields, simply use a Marketo Flow action to move a checkbox=True to Newsletter=Yes along with the corresponding Change Campaign Member Status=Opted In.

Step 11: once you are ready to go live, add a link to this page on your Privacy page. Then go to Admin>Email and adjust the Unsubscribe links with the correct page URL.

Example Subscription Pages Using Marketo:

• Marketo’s Subscription Management Page – what people often look to as the template for doing this in Marketo.
• Economist Intelligence Unit Subscription Management – this is my basic system with a standard Marketo Form and Landing Page.
• Bersin’s Subscription Management Page – also a good example of using standard Marketo Forms and Pages.

• How to build subscription management using javascript