Effective lead qualification is crucial for successful marketing campaigns, and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) provides key tools to streamline this process. Pardot’s scoring and grading capabilities are essential for identifying valuable prospects. Scoring indicates a prospect’s engagement level through numerical points based on interactions, while grading assesses how closely they match your ideal customer profile, using letter grades from A+ to F.
In this guide, we’ll explore how to implement scoring and grading effectively in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. We’ll cover setting up customized models, automating the process, and testing configurations to ensure qualified leads reach your sales team. Whether you’re new to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement or seeking optimization tips, this article offers a framework for smarter lead qualification.
Overview
Understanding Pardot Scoring and Grading
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement provides two complementary tools that together create a powerful lead qualification framework. Let’s explore how these features work and why they’re so valuable for your marketing efforts.
What is Pardot scoring?
Pardot scoring quantifies prospect engagement with your marketing initiatives through a numerical value system. This dynamic metric reflects how interested a lead is in your products or services based on their interactions.
The scoring mechanism automatically assigns points to prospects when they perform specific actions:
- Page views (+1 point)
- Form submissions (+50 points)
- Email clicks
- File downloads
For example, a prospect who fills out an important form receives more points than someone who simply visits your website. Additionally, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement allows you to customize these values to align with your specific business goals.
What is Pardot grading?
In contrast, Pardot grading evaluates how well a prospect fits your ideal customer profile (ICP). The system assigns letter grades from A+ to F based on demographic and firmographic attributes. All prospects start with a grade of D and move up or down in ⅓ increments depending on how they match your criteria.
Common grading criteria include:
- Location relevance to your target market
- Industry alignment with your solutions
- Job title (focusing on decision-makers)
- Company size appropriateness
Unlike scoring, grading requires setup through automation rules that adjust grades based on your defined criteria.
How they work together in lead qualification
The real power comes from using both tools simultaneously. A prospect can have four possible combinations of scores and grades that help prioritize your sales outreach:
- High score, high grade – These VIP prospects show both interest and fit, representing your best conversion opportunities
- High score, low grade – Interested but poor fits (often researching or job-hunting)
- Low score, high grade – Perfect matches who need nurturing before becoming sales-ready
- Low score, low grade – Neither interested nor suitable
This blended approach helps align sales and marketing teams around standardized lead qualification processes. Furthermore, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement enables automatic triggering of actions based on score thresholds, such as assigning leads to sales when they reach sufficient engagement levels.
At VALiNTRY360, we specialize in configuring these tools to match your specific business requirements, ensuring your teams focus on the most promising prospects while nurturing others appropriately.
Setting Up Your Grading Model
The foundation of successful lead qualification starts with properly configuring your grading model in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot). This process transforms basic lead tracking into a strategic qualification system that aligns perfectly with your business objectives.
Choose your grading criteria
First, identify the characteristics that define your ideal customer. This critical step requires collaboration with your sales team to determine which data points truly indicate quality prospects. At VALiNTRY360, we recommend selecting 4-5 key criteria to keep your grading framework manageable and effective.
Focus on objective attributes that can be captured as data fields, such as:
- Annual revenue ranges
- Geographic location (country/city)
- Industry classifications
- Job titles or department roles
- Target account status
Specifically, choose fields that are structured as dropdown menus, checkboxes, or number fields, as these work most effectively within Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s automation system. Remember that qualitative “gut feel” criteria often used in high-touch sales processes may not translate well to automated grading systems.
Build a grading matrix
Once you’ve identified your criteria, create a matrix that organizes them alongside possible values and match strengths. This structured approach ensures consistent evaluation across all prospects. Your matrix should indicate how strongly each value matches your ideal customer profile.
For a basic approach, use a simple match/no-match system. Nevertheless, for more nuanced qualification, develop an advanced matrix with multiple levels of matching:
- Strong match (increases grade by a full letter)
- Good match (increases grade by 2/3 letter)
- Weak match (increases grade by 1/3 letter)
- No match (no grade change)
Subsequently, test your matrix by plotting sample prospects through the system. This “sense check” confirms whether prospects you know are high-quality would indeed receive appropriate grades.
Create and configure grading profiles
Profiles in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement act as containers that hold your grading criteria. Consequently, they’re essential to implementing your grading model. Navigate to Prospects → Segmentation → Profiles to access this feature.
Every Marketing Cloud Account Engagement account includes a “Default” profile automatically assigned to new prospects. You can either modify this profile or create additional ones for different buyer personas. When setting up a profile, assign appropriate weightings to each criterion based on their importance in your qualification process.
Assign prospects to profiles
Although each prospect can belong to only one profile, you have multiple options for assignment:
- Manual assignment (recommended for initial testing)
- Automation rules that assign prospects based on specific criteria
- Mass import for existing prospect databases
At VALiNTRY360, our Marketing Cloud Account Engagement specialists can help design and implement a grading model that precisely targets your ideal customers, therefore ensuring your sales team focuses exclusively on the most promising opportunities.
Implementing Scoring in Pardot
Once you’ve established your grading model, it’s time to implement scoring within Marketing Cloud Account Engagement to track prospect engagement levels. Let’s explore how to optimize this powerful lead qualification feature.
Default scoring model explained
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement arrives with a pre-configured baseline scoring model that assigns points based on prospect interactions. Primarily, this includes:
- Form submissions (+50 points)
- Custom redirect clicks (+3 points)
- Unique page views (+1 point)
- Email opens (typically 0 points by default)
This out-of-box framework provides a logical starting point, yet remember that any changes to the default model apply retroactively to all prospect records.
Customizing scoring rules
Beyond baseline scoring, you can adjust point values to align with your specific business needs. Consider which actions demonstrate genuine buying intent rather than casual interest. For instance, downloading a technical white paper might deserve higher points than simply opening an email.
Using scoring categories
Scoring categories allow you to track prospect interest across multiple products or services – up to 50 categories per account. This feature requires proper folder organization of your marketing assets, as assets within specific folders contribute points to their associated categories.
Setting up score decay
To prevent score inflation, implement score decay for inactive prospects. Since this isn’t available out-of-box, create automation rules that reduce scores after periods of inactivity. At VALiNTRY360, our specialists often recommend decaying scores to a specific value rather than by incremental amounts to ensure truly disengaged prospects don’t remain falsely prioritized.
Automating and Testing Your Model
After configuring your scoring and grading models, automation becomes the key to making these systems truly effective. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) offers powerful tools to put your qualification framework on autopilot.
Create automation rules for grading
Automation rules act as the engine behind your grading profiles, applying grade adjustments based on defined criteria. For organization, use a consistent naming convention such as “GRADING-[profile]-[criteria]-[match level]”. In the rules section, set match type to “Match all” and include conditions that specify which prospects should be affected:
- Prospect profile is [specific profile name]
- [Your criteria field] is [value list]
Then in the actions section, use “Change profile criteria” to tell Marketing Cloud Account Engagement which grading adjustments to make. Most importantly, prevent grade stacking by resetting other match levels to “not known” whenever one level is activated.
Set up completion actions for scoring
Completion actions transform prospect interactions into automated responses. These powerful triggers can assign sales reps to prospects once they reach specified score thresholds. According to best practices, develop an automated process that identifies ideal customers through:
- Automation rules for each scoring category
- Consideration of minimum score requirements
- Appropriate grade thresholds
- Exclusion criteria for non-leads
Remember that automation rules start paused for review before activation.
Test with sample prospects
Before activating any automation, thoroughly preview rule effects. Examining each rule carefully prevents unexpected results that could affect your entire prospect database. At VALiNTRY360, our Marketing Cloud Account Engagement specialists recommend never activating rules without first reviewing their potential impact on representative sample data.
Review and adjust based on results
Regular assessment keeps your model optimized. Monitor key performance indicators:
- Category conversion rates compared to expectations
- Opportunity won/lost ratios to evaluate lead quality
- Performance differences between categories
- Potential overinflated scoring for specific touchpoints
- Appropriateness of repeat timing settings
This continuous refinement ensures your Marketing Cloud Account Engagement implementation delivers maximum value.
Conclusion
Effective lead qualification using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement provides a competitive edge for businesses. This guide explains how scoring and grading work together to identify prospects who match your ideal customer profile, helping your sales team focus on leads most likely to convert. Creating a customized grading matrix requires careful consideration of your business needs. Effective scoring values prospect activities based on their importance to your sales process. Automation is key for making these systems efficient, as well-configured rules eliminate manual work and ensure consistent evaluations. Thorough testing before implementation is vital for delivering qualified leads.
At VALiNTRY360, we provide tailored Marketing Cloud Account Engagement solutions, whether for setting up scoring models or optimizing existing ones. Regularly review and adjust your scoring and grading models based on performance data to transition from generating leads to identifying truly qualified prospects.
