Most of us using Marketo for demographic scoring are using a basic trigger or batch campaign that only listens once when the Lead is Created or the Data Value is Changed. This means that the first time the Lead shares with us her Title or Department, we score it.
That’s it.
We never re-score that Lead no matter what else changes in her demographic profile.
Should anything change in that profile, we do nothing. Now, you might think that it is rare for a demographic profile to change, and that it is more likely the Lead leaves their original firm before their Title changes. Probably true!
But what if we are wrong about that? What if the profile looks more like this the first time the Lead tells us about themselves?
NAME: JD EMAIL: XXXX@gmail.com TITLE: whatever COMPANY: MRG PHONE: 617000000
(How many times have you done this yourself, let alone see it in your system?)
We would likely score this Lead low on Demographics and fairly high on Behavior. The next time the Lead fills out a form, they update the email and Title because now they are more serious about speaking with us. Yet, the system never updates their Demo Score! Thus, it can potentially hold back leads that should have been MQL, or prioritized by Sales.
To resolve this gap in our ability to rank leads, let’s introduce Demographic Rescoring. This is a technique I learned from Marketo Consultants, but I’ve rarely seen anyone else implement it, including other Marketo Consultants!
Step 1: Main Trigger
Create a central trigger that listens for any new lead and only the Data Value Changes you want to score on. If you are concerned about lead volume creating a trigger backlog, then you might want to daisy chain this into your lead lifecycle, or use a batch system instead.
This central flow will then re-set the Demographic scores.
Step 2: Request Campaigns for Each Demographic Field
Once the Demographic Score is re-set, the flows will call the scoring flows that are needed. So if the lead only qualifies for a Title score, that’s all it will get.
Step 3: Test
Before trashing the old system, test the new system by adding the Email Address CONTAINS brake and run some new leads and old test leads through it.
What you should see is that changing the Title triggers the main flow, which requests all of the demographic score campaigns and it attempts to re-set and re-score each value we care about.
Then look at the Lead’s Log Activity. Most of the time you should see a complete score re-set for Demographic Score and a re-build.
Then look at the Campaign’s Results tab. Most of the time you should see complete log of the re-score and rebuild. I’ve noticed that sometimes the Results seem to skip over the re-score, yet the score is fine in the end. Just be aware of this.
Step 4: Activate
There is no need to re-set everyone’s scores ahead of time, unless you really want to do so. Keep in mind that if you want to re-score everyone’s Demo Score, you can do so with a Batch campaign instead (which will be faster and safer). All we are doing here is converting the old system to a new, responsive one that will only trigger on New Leads and Leads who change their information.
Caveats
There are a few caveats to consider:
- Re-scoring seems to fail, or appears to fail, from time to time. At least that’s what the logs say. An actual failure may be rare.
- High Volume Systems create a giant trigger backlog because this relies on triggers.
- Batch System may work better – you could run a daily batch to call the child triggers on Request Campaign. You can also run a daily batch overall instead. This depends on how badly you want to re-score demographics.
- Data appending will trigger this system frequently. Again, it could cause a backlog if this is high volume.
Long time readers know I’m not a big fan of demographic scoring at all, but many firms do this and this is how to handle re-scoring.
Hi Josh, Such re-scoring has a significant flaw, specially if you are using score change as a trigger to lead qualification and other alert campaigns. In the suggested approach you seem to reset the score back to just the behavior score (score goes backward), and then it recalculates the updated score with the demo score. So even when the title changed, a score may go from 100 to 70 and then back to 95 or 100 or 105. And if my threshold of MQL is 100, it may trigger the MQL process again. A slightly modified approach we use is to recalculate the demo score in a separate kind of temporary score variable, and then only change the demo score or total score if it changes by the re-scoring. This way score doesn’t thrash through multiple value changes avoiding any confusing triggers based on score changes.
This is a good point. In my experience, very few leads trigger this. My MQL is also setup to only let the score change trigger on the way up, and only every X days to avoid over alerting sales. If the lead is already MQL, it’s not going to do anything. If anything, this will impact leads who decide to provide real data and were under the MQL threshold, which is what we want.
Another area to watch out for is Enrichment services running amok on records. Usually the enrichment is done at the time of creation, but if you run a higher volume operation and then update records frequently, it would cause a trigger backlog.