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3 Easy Steps to Building a Pardot Lead Grading Profile

Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2024 7:44 am
by akiyaaa
Lead Grading in Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) helps marketing and sales teams prioritise high-quality inbound leads. As Pardot lead grading is a measure of customer fit, this feature ensures your sales reps only work leads that fit a typical buyer profile, so conversations can be smooth and relevant, with no time wasted on those leads unlikely to bring in revenue.

In case this is the first time you’re learning about Pardot Grading, in a nutshell, a grade is used to determine how well a prospect fits your company’s ideal prospect profile using explicit criteria and Automation Rules.

Where behaviour by customers and prospects is what drives lead scores, grading needs no activity from the prospect. Instead, the personal and company data you already hold determines each grade. This data can include location, industry, job title, and other information that helps you qualify and rank prospects.

Prospects will be graded immediately using the data fields completed, although the grade can also change over time as you gather extra data.

Ultimately, the higher the letter grade, the more interested that prospect will likely be, giving the green light for your sales team to reach out.

Swot up on Pardot Lead Scoring and Grading with this free B2B Marketer’s Handbook.

The question is, how do you plan and build grading profiles in Pardot/Account Engagement?

Many users get hung up on building the perfect grading framework, when really it can be quite simple to get started. Here’s how to expedite the process for immediate improvements to your lead flow.



3 easy steps towards grading
1. Establish your buyer persona(s)
Firstly, it’s important to be clear about exactly who your typical buyer is. It’s essential to discuss your ideal customer with the sales team, to ensure you’re on the same page, and to determine which pieces of data should danish telephone numbers be used to qualify a prospect.

Using a mixture of anecdotal insights from sales, marketing, and maybe even customer service teams, as well as quantitative data about your current customers exported from your Salesforce account, you can agree on the typical attributes of an ideal customer. Pull this information into a documented buyer persona, creating multiple if you have multiple buyer types.

Once you have created your buyer persona or personas, navigate in the Account Engagement Lightning App to Prospects > Segmentation > Profiles, where you can input this information using the relevant criteria. When it comes to adding the criteria, each profile can have different default and custom fields associated with it, allowing you to grade prospects in a way that is unique to each one.

Screenshot of the Pardot lead grading profiles setup

You can start with a single profile, or if you have clear and distinct buyer personas you may wish to be ambitious and have more than one Grading Profile. There is no harm in starting small and building or adapting from there after testing and learning.

2. Check your data points
Let’s look at deciding what specific criteria in Pardot is best to use for your Grading Profile. In order to have an effective grading system, you need to use relative da