Pardot scoring is a way to measure the engagement of your prospects with your marketing campaigns and content. It assigns a numerical value, or “score,” to each prospect based on their activity, such as opening emails, visiting your website, or filling out forms. This allows you to prioritize your leads and focus your efforts on the most engaged prospects.

For example, you may give a score of 10 points for each email opened, 20 points for each form submitted, and 50 points for a demo request. This way, a prospect who has opened 5 emails, submitted 2 forms, and requested a demo would have a total score of 110.

The best practice for Pardot scoring is to set up a scoring model that aligns with your sales process and lead qualification criteria. This way, you can easily identify which prospects are most likely to convert into customers. It’s also important to regularly review and adjust your scoring model as your sales process and lead qualification criteria may change over time.

Additionally, it’s important to set up scoring thresholds so that you can automatically move prospects to different stages of your sales process based on their score. For example, you can set a threshold of 100 points to move a prospect to the “sales-qualified” stage and another threshold of 200 points to move them to the “customer” stage.

Degrading Pardot scores for unengaged users

If a Pardot prospect is no longer engaging with your marketing, then their current Pardot score may be misleading. These types of prospects may have a high Pardot score because they were engaged in the past, but this doesn’t reflect their current reality.

In order to address this problem you need to put in place an automation rule which will degrade their Pardot score over time. To do this use the following automation rule.

First select Automation Rules from the menu.

Next click on the blue + Add Automation Rules

Name your automation rule. In this example we are calling the automation rule “Pardot score degradation rule”. Place your new automation rule in an appropriate folder. It is also best practice to write a short description of your new automation rule, so that you and other users will be able to quickly understand its purpose in the future.

Create your automation rules

Now you need to create the rules for your automation rule. For this automation rule we are only going to have a single rule, so you can keep Match all selected.

Next from the drop down menu you want to select Prospect time. From the next drop down option choose the last activity days ago and is greater than. The amount of time you select will depend on what you consider a reasonable period for a lack of activity before degrading the score. For example, you may decide that a prospect who has not engaged with your content in the last year should have their Pardot score degraded. In this case we would enter 365 in the last field.

Enter your actions

The next step is to enter your actions. These are what you want to happen to prospects who meet the criteria you have set above.

In this case we want to have their Pardot score modified. So from the drop down option select Adjust prospect score. You have two options for how you want to change their Pardot score, these are to and by. Because Pardot prospects will all have a different Pardot score, it makes most sense to use to, so that you can reset them back to the same point. In this case we will choose 10. 

This means that any prospects who haven’t engaged with our marketing in the last year, will have their Pardot score reset to 10.

When you are ready for the automation rule to run click on the blue Create automation rules button.