Lead scoring and lead grading are two commonly used techniques to qualify leads — that is, to determine if a lead is worth passing from your marketing team on to sales.
Lead scoring: Automatically scoring inbound leads with a numerical value to indicate how interested they are in your product or service. By assigning points to the prospect’s actions you deem the most valuable, like visiting the pricing page or requesting a demo, you can create a score for your leads that will show how active they have been and how high their interest level is.
Marketers can use various actions to contribute to a lead’s score, including the number of pages visited and searches performed on your site, whether or not prospects downloaded any resources from your site, and if they got to your site via an email click-through. These and other factors make up a lead scoring model.
Lead grading: Automatically evaluating inbound leads with a letter grade (A — F) based on a number of factors. Grading leads ensures that the leads being passed from marketing to sales match your company’s ideal customer profile.
Similar to a lead scoring process, various criteria are used to set up a lead grading system, including a lead’s location, industry, job title, and company size.
Lead scoring and lead grading are very effective when used in tandem to make sure that only the most qualified leads get passed from marketing to sales.
Salesforce offers customizable, automated solutions for lead scoring and grading, including Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, our marketing automation solution. Salesforce lead scoring integrates into our CRM platform for an easy and powerful user experience.
Check out these resources to learn more about scoring and grading leads in Salesforce.
Trailhead: Sales Cloud Productivity Best Practices: Direct Your Reps to the Best Leads
Go hands-on with setting up lead scoring for your company. Gain an understanding of some lead scoring best practices in Salesforce.
Trailhead: Take a Tour of Salesforce Einstein
Learn how Einstein Lead Scoring uses artificial intelligence to predict which leads are most likely to convert and why. See how Salesforce predictive lead scoring can help your sales reps work smarter.
Trailhead: Sales Cloud Einstein: Target the Best Leads
See how Sales Cloud Einstein’s artificial intelligence can analyze your history of lead conversions to help you target the best leads going forward. Salesforce’s lead scoring model has never been more powerful.
Trailhead: Opportunity Management: Qualify and Route Leads to Your Reps
Understand the importance of prioritizing and qualifying leads quickly and effectively. Learn how Salesforce lead scoring can help your marketing team qualify and route leads to sales.
Trailhead: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Lead Scoring and Grading
See how to use scoring and grading in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Salesforce’s marketing automation tool, to identify the best leads for your sales team. Supercharge your marketing team with automated lead scoring on the Customer 360 Platform.
Official Documentation: Prioritize Leads with Einstein Lead Scoring
Learn how Salesforce Einstein uses artificial intelligence to score your leads, and how your sales team can prioritize its leads by score.
Official Documentation: Understand How Einstein Scores Your Leads
Gain a deeper understanding of how Einstein Lead Scoring uses data science and machine learning to discover the patterns in your business’ lead conversions, and how to predict which current leads to prioritize.
Trailblazer Community: Scoring Prospects with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement
Its overview explains how prospects are scored and how to modify the scoring rules to fit your business needs.
Best Practices: The Basic Science Behind Lead Scoring
Check out this quick primer on some important aspects of lead scoring and how they benefit your organization.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Blog: 4 Lead Scoring and Grading Scenarios Explained
What’s the difference between lead scoring and lead grading, and why would you ever need both? Take a look at what the different combinations of lead scores and grades really mean for your business.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Video: Scoring and Grading
Get inside effective scoring and grading, part of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s Weekly Best Practice and Strategy Webinars series.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement: Scoring and Grading Lab
Go hands on with an interactive look at how automatically qualifying leads with scoring and grading can save time, increase close rates, and improve sales and marketing alignment.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Video: Salesforce for Startups: Qualify Your Leads
Learn how to use scoring and grading to determine your perfect lead. Presented by Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Video: Automated Lead Scoring and Grading Demo
Watch this one-minute video to see how easy lead scoring and grading is, how it works, and how it can help you.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Training: Lead Qualification: Scoring Categories
Get step-by-step training for using multiple scoring categories to score a prospect on more than one product or lines of business.
