Account Engagement (AE) scores sound great in theory – and in many ways, they are. But with some quick adjustments you can make them work even smarter for you and your teams.
Where do we start?
So what is an Account Engagement Score?
Put simply, it tells you how ‘engaged’ a prospect really is with your marketing efforts.
Open an email? Here’s three points. Filled out a form? You can have 50 points. Click on a link? Why not, here’s some more points!
It’s a way to nurture someone from ‘cold’ to the point where they are engaged and ready to hand off to sales. If a prospect hits a score of 100 (assuming that’s the MQL number agreed with marketing), they’re officially sales ready.
But what happens after the hand off? What does the score mean then?
Left unchecked, it can be as useful as a chocolate fireguard. It’s just a number (really, that’s it) The problem is… the score is just a number.
I’m often asked if we can see the score and engagement from within a certain timeframe – the last three months or half-year. But that’s not possible without hard work. It’s just a number field that goes up and up with each link click, form fill and file download. I’ve seen scores in the hundreds of thousands…for a prospect that came in years ago and engaged regularly – but in real life their last engagement wasn’t within six months. That’s not engagement—that’s clutter.
So how can we deal with this?
Solution 1: Introduce Scoring Degradation
Think of this as tidying up the attic.
If someone hasn’t interacted in months, should they still be being treated as a hot lead? Probably not.
Annoyingly, AE doesn’t do this out of the box BUT you can create automation rules or use Engagement Studio to slowly reduce scores over time if no activity is detected. For example, you could reduce their score by 20 if they haven’t engaged with you in the past three months.
Another rule could be to say that if it’s been six months, then reduce their score by a further 30 (which would be 50 in total)?
Be mindful that this doesn’t mean you solve the above problem totally. If someone doesn’t meet this criteria (ie. they engage with you every month), their score will still continue to rise.
Also, be conscious of your average engagement patterns and the scores to be applied.
In the above example, my client attracted hobbyists to their brand, so a three-month measure wouldn’t work but looking at a week or a month would.
Solution 2: Reset After Milestones
Some people use score thresholds to trigger actions— for example, when someone hits 100 points, they get dropped into a nurture sequence or sent to Sales.
If you’re using scores for these types of milestones or triggers, why not do a hard reset of their score back to zero? Then they can work their way back up to the threshold or milestone. Doing it this way treats their score more like mini-engagement sprints.
You can use automation rules to achieve this too – but add a buffer to the score. If your milestone for a trigger is 100, set the rule to be 150, for example. Not only does this account for someone that will go over 100 for their next engagement but it also accounts for not knowing which system will act first, AE or Salesforce. It allows both systems to do their job before the score is reset.
Solution 3: Treat Grading as your North Star
It continues to surprise me how many companies are not doing grading at all or even taking it seriously. Mostly the former. For shame!
The two are meant to go hand in hand but as a former sales person, I would rather be given a Grade A prospect that’s less engaged than a Grade C prospect who is engaged.
Scoring and Grading is a bit like dating someone.
Scoring is how interested they are in you (ie they are engaging with your marketing efforts) and Grading is how interested you are in them (their job title, location, industry fit your ICP, for example). It basically tells you who someone is. So if the score is high but the grade is naff, salespeople could be wasting their time on people who were never a good fit.
It’s better to focus on getting your grading right – then you might just put someone who was the right fit in front of sales.
With a high score, even better.
The score shouldn’t be left unattended. It won’t take care of itself and as part of our use of AE, you should have a pro-active plan for keeping the score audited and up to date and keeping an eye on how it’s being used. Don’t let it run wild!
I also believe that out of the two, Grading should be considered the most important – first and foremost we are trying to identify the right people. They either meet your ICP or they don’t. If you’re struggling to make sense of grading (or want help setting up a smart scoring strategy), drop us a line and we can help.
