As we enter the new year, marketers using Dynamics 365 have probably started considering which leads you should be chasing up for the year. But what do you do if you have so many? How do we know which ones are likely to engage with our communications? Well, fortunately, Dynamics 365 Marketing has a sophisticated lead scoring facility to filter the opportunity that represents the most potential to your business.
How does it work?
With Lead Scoring, marketing departments can customise their very own lead scoring model, which is a set of rules and criteria that gives every lead a score. When the score threshold has been met, they are flagged as Sales Ready. The threshold, like the rules and points, awarded or reducted, are entirely decided by you.
As an illustrative example, you may have a business that operates locally and may want to attribute 50 points to leads who are in the same city as you, or perhaps just 10 for a lead-based in your county. You could also score based on engagement with your business, for example by how many clicks via email campaigns to your website, when they've clicked enough times, it's demonstrated they are interested in your business and therefore approachable to convert into a customer. How you set the grading system is entirely up to you. You can set multiple rules up and even add further complexity such as additional expressions; for example, score points are only awarded once all criteria in a given rule are met.
It's possible also to create negative scoring, such as an event where the lead unsubscribes. Dynamics 365 Marketing has many options for customising your lead scoring model, such as website clicks, form registrations, workflow triggers, lead information and more. You can have more than one model, and which therefore allows you to have different criteria for whats sales-ready across different products and services, or perhaps you want to compare to see what is more likely to be fruitful to your business.
How to set up a model
Firstly, open up your Dynamics 365 Marketing application and navigate to Lead Scoring Model on the left menu panel. Create a new model by clicking +New on the top menu. You should see a screen that resembles the following image.
On the right-hand side, you can drag conditions using the mouse over to the main box, and begin creating new configurations such as in the image below, by selecting an entity and the parameters to receive a score.
When you have finished creating all of your logic, you need to set a sales-ready score that triggers when enough points have been awarded to the lead, as shown in the below image:
When you are happy with the setup, you can click go live at the top. This will take a few moments to activate. If you want to see a list of how leads are scoring and if they are sales-ready based on your model, navigate to the submenu 'Related' and click 'Lead Scores.' This view will show you a list of each lead that has been awarded score points and if they have reached the sales-ready threshold. You can also navigate to each lead in your system, and by default, the lead score will appear on the right-hand side of your screen.
And that's it! Please note that for a lead to qualify, it needs to have a contact associated; otherwise, you will get errors. We suggest you experiment to see which model works for your business before you start using it, and you don't neglect leads that don't meet your sales-ready threshold, as it might be your business logic that needs tweaking.
