Lead Scoring with Dynamics 365 Marketing

With more and more technologically advanced customer relationship management systems, marketing teams need to grow their processes to better isolate real prospective customers from leads that are less likely to close. Analytics have helped in distilling specific target behaviors, but the actual act of converting someone from a lead into an opportunity or a customer requires a way to sort between those behaviors to see who’s the real deal. The easiest way to do this is Rule-Based Lead Scoring which can be used to rank each lead by their behaviors, which results in a score that measures the likelihood that lead will convert. A marketer can then look at the lead’s score and target those leads that reach a certain score threshold.

Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Marketing contains a comprehensive lead scoring system that helps marketers do exactly that. With an easy to use UI-based scoring module, it is simple to create scoring models that rank leads and automatically target them. In addition, Dynamics 365 Marketing allows for leads that reach a certain score threshold to be targeted automatically by marketing campaigns which can help change those leads into true opportunities. Even better, the system also allows for automatic conversion once a lead meets a certain threshold. Even if the lead suddenly turns cold, these automatic processes help to reduce the time a marketer might waste on an unlikely customer. All of these processes can drastically streamline the process of conversion, which can ensure the marketing process is regulated and unified for most potential customers.

So how does all of this work in Dynamics 365 Marketing? There are a few prerequisites to follow before creating your first scoring model. The primary prerequisite is that leads have to be associated with existing contacts or accounts to be scored. These can be associated using the first step of the “lead to opportunity marketing sales process” and adding the contact to either the existing contact or existing account field.

This may mean you’ll need to adjust your existing plan for creating leads since the contact will have to be created before you can associate it with a lead. One of the easiest ways to do this would be to set up a standard form configuration, which allows a marketing form to update both contacts and leads automatically.

Creating a scoring model

First, navigate to Lead Scoring using the left navigation and click Scoring Models.

To add a new scoring model, click New at the top of the page. Switching tabs on the top to the Summary tab will show the summary page. Give your scoring model an appropriate name in the name field.

Next, the scoring model needs the target field to be filled so it knows what target to focus on. The only options here are contact and account. This is why it is important to already have associated your lead with an account or contact. Select whichever you used for association and save the model. If you switch off the Summary tab back to the Design tab, you can now enter the designing phase of the scoring model.

Scoring models are a relatively robust tool in Dynamics 365 Marketing. On the right side of the scoring model you can see the options for the lead model. Scoring models are comprised of two parts, a behavior evaluation and a scoring system. A condition is the basic unit of the scoring models and uses behavior evaluation. Conditions compare your lead’s behaviors with conditions that you have set to check if the behavior satisfies your target condition.

Actions, on the other hand, score the lead’s behavior and combine to form the ultimate rating of the lead. Before you can place an action, you first need to place a condition on your design board. Name your condition in the Properties tab on the right. Click the drop down on the condition to begin working with it. Here you can choose the entity which you are monitoring. These can include things like form submissions, website clicks, and email openings. After choosing your entity, you can choose the frequency of the condition, the date range, and any additional expressions which might help you evaluate the quality of the lead. If you add more of these, you’ll be able to filter the conditions by more conditions for more specific behaviors.

After completing your first condition, switch back to the Toolbox tab and add an action to the end of your condition. You’ll need to evaluate how important that action is to your sales process and assign it a number. You can do this by clicking back to the Properties tab on the right and accessing the Score Update property. You can also choose to have behaviors count against the scoring totals. A drastic example of this would be someone blocking your email account, which would indicate a significant drop in the score for a lead.

The final step in the process is evaluation: where leads are graded on their overall quality. If you click on the Grades tab, you’ll see a Sales Ready Score, which, when reached, will flag the lead as viable enough to be contacted by a salesperson.

Only having one state is not a very useful system, so it is important to add additional thresholds to the scale. To do this, click the New button underneath the Sales Ready Score property. In the Grade box, name your grade something that indicates the strength of the lead. You’ll need to create a system for grading, but a simple system would have hot, cold, and warm leads. Use the From and To fields to set the range that this grade would be active. If the Sales Ready Score was 300, you could assign 299-250 for hot, 249-150 for warm, and 149-0 for cold. Once you have all of your grade setup completed, you can save it and click the Go Live button at the top.

To see the score for a given lead, return to Leads under Lead Management and click on a lead that’s associated to a contact or account depending on what you set. Under Lead Engagement, you’ll be able to see the new quality of the lead and that’s all there is to it.

In the end, scoring models in Dynamics 365 Marketing is a relatively robust tool which allows for quick lead evaluations. If you want to get more in-depth with your scoring system, make sure to explore the various options inside conditions and make sure to create enough of them to meet your threshold.