Pardot is the B2B Marketing Automation platform from Salesforce, and it’s awesome because it’s the only marketing automation solution built and running directly on Salesforce CRM.

Pardot empowers marketing and sales teams to work together more effectively to find new leads, nurture those leads to the point that they’re sales-ready, and then pass those leads over to sales to close deals and maximize revenue.

Breaking it down: Prospect score vs prospect grade

A prospect in Salesforce Pardot is a potential buyer.  For example, you might be running a campaign that drives traffic to your website where you capture prospect information such as a name, email address, job title, company name, and more.

But before you pass this inbound lead over to your sales team to have a meeting, you want to make sure that the prospect is sales-ready, or one that meets your marketing qualification criteria.

That’s where prospect scoring and grading come in.

Prospect score

A prospects score is a numerical value (ie from 1-100) that indicates how interested the potential buyer is in your products and services.  By assigning points to the prospect score, you deem them more valuable.  Certain actions taken by the prospect can increase their score, such as visiting your pricing page, requesting a demo, reading your online content, or responding to your email programs.  For example:

• Prospect responded to campaign (+10 points)
• Prospect completed a form on your site (+10 points)
• Prospect viewed your pricing page (+20 points)
• Prospect viewed your online content (+5 points)
• Prospect opened one of your emails (+2 points)
• Prospect clicked through one of your emails (+5 points)
  

That’s a total of 52 points, and it looks like this person is quite interested in what you sell!

But the next question is, how interested is your company in selling to this person?  That’s where the prospect grade comes in.

Prospect grade

A prospect grade is a letter value (ie A - F) measuring how well that prospect meets your ideal customer profile.  Prospects are automatically valued based on the data that you have about them and are evaluated on a number of implicit factors, such as location, industry, job title, or company size. For example:

• Location: London, UK
• Industry: Healthcare and Life Sciences
• Job Title: COO
• Company Size: 1000+ employees
  

Now if your company sells it’s products to operational executives at large healthcare companies in the UK, you’re in luck, this would be an A+

The combination of score and grade is pretty powerful

When you combine a prospect score and grade you have something pretty powerful.  You know how interested the potential buyer is in you and how interested you are in selling to them.  

So you can imagine that the combination of this data is one of the key factors in determining if this lead is ready to connect with your sales team. Let’s look at an example of a few inbound prospects that you have scored and graded in Salesforce Pardot

In this case, we find that Samantha and Bob are both really great, because they have shown intent to buy your product and they are a great fit for your ideal customer profile. So how can you treat them in a special manner and get them engaged with your sales team instantly?

Time to roll out the red carpet

Whenever prospects like Samantha and Bob come to your website, either directly, click through one of your emails, or respond to one of your campaigns, you can roll out the red carpet and give them the white glove treatment.

If you use Qualified for Salesforce Pardot, your sales team can greet them by name, and they can have a high fidelity conversation about any topic of interest.  Your reps can be there, in real-time, to answer questions, handle objections, talk pricing, and persuade valuable prospects to take the next action.

Most importantly, your sales team will only be having these high quality conversations with the qualified buyers, so they won’t be wasting any time talking to or meeting with prospects that don’t meet your rigid criteria as defined by prospect score and grade.

Qualification with the power of Salesforce Pardot

Using the Qualified conversational marketing platform is a pretty powerful thing.  Meeting instantly with qualified leads and having high fidelity sales conversations in real-time has been proven to boost lead capture by +36% and pipeline generation by +62%.  

When the data from Salesforce Pardot, including prospect score and grade, are used in real-time, conversational marketing becomes exponentially more powerful.  

Want to see it in action?  Sign up below to request a live demo and learn more at www.qualified.com/pardot