Prioritising leads in Dynamics 365 Marketing through Lead Scoring is an intelligent method for assessing when
it is the right time to chase leads and convert them into new business. Lead Scoring looks at demographics,
firmographics alongside actions, aggregating individual factors to prioritise the most important leads for your business.
You’re able to create and tailor particular conditions such as email interactions, form submissions or individual
factors such as job role Portals or email interactions etc, within your Lead Scoring algorithm.
If you’re new to the term Firmographics - this simply looks at any information about organisations that can be
used to place them into individual segments. It’s similar to demographics, which groups people into defined
segments. Similarly, firmographics is used to classify companies into their own individual firmographic segment.
Because Lead Scoring is an automated process, you need to pay particular attention to privacy, so that GDPR
compliance is respected and monitored alongside your Lead Scoring process
Sales Ready Score
A plugin-based threshold is used with Lead Scoring, to activate leads for action, known as the Sales Ready Score. Reaching the Sales Ready Score can activate a series of events with Dynamics 365, promoting the lead to the attention of your organisational sales function, to follow up on the business opportunity.
Behind the scenes within CRM, when the Sales Ready Score reaches threshold, a sales-ready flag for the individual lead is set to ‘true’ and the active stage of the lead-to-opportunity marketing business process flow is set to ‘sales acceptance’.
The Sales Ready Score functionality needs to be enabled within Dynamics 365 Marketing. This can be configured by looking under Marketing settings, then changing the settings to ‘Automatic sales ready’ to ‘yes’, as you can see below.
Once you’ve enabled Automatic Sales in Marketing Settings, you will need an active Lead Scoring model with a Sales Ready Score. In the screenshot below, several conditions based on emails, events and forms have been set.
In this example, whenever a lead reaches a threshold Sales Ready Score, set to 40, you will see the business process flow jump to the last stage.
In this example, creating a lead and adding a contact who reaches the Sales ready score of 40, is required for a lead to move to the sales ready Status.
Hitting SAVE, adds the Lead score from the existing contact and the business process flow begins.
After refreshing the Lead, you can see the Lead-to-opportunity marketing business process flow has progressed to the last stage where the user adds to CRM, if a sale has been accepted or not.
This information can be extremely useful and can be readily monitored within a dashboard, such as the example below.
By creating a field that reflects the stage of the Lead-to-opportunity marketing business process flow you’re able to create views and charts, showing how many leads are at Sales Acceptance stage, which is important information for any Salesperson.
Summary
Activating the Sales Ready Score feature within Lead Scoring, is the ideal way to integrate your internal marketing and sales functions. Your marketing team can fine tune a Sales Ready Score by giving different interactions, different scores and weighting the scores based on designated contacts/leads.
This better informs your sales team, making them aware of specific leads which require more attention. Sales Ready logic can then be automatically implemented into your business process flow.
Further information about Lead Scoring can be found on the official Microsoft site at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/dynamics365/marketing/score-manage-leads.
See Also:
Information: Pre-programmed Lead Scoring can present Data-Privacy issues regulated by laws such as the GDPR. Please note it is your organisation's responsibility to ensure that it is in line with full compliance with all relevant Data-Privacy Regulations when you use Dynamics 365 Marketing. See our article on keeping GDPR Compliant GDPR - What Is It Really About?
Next: Dynamics 365 Marketing: Top 5 Best Features