In Sugar Market, lead scores are based on the actions in the overall lifetime of the contact/lead in the system. However, scorable records are only rescored each time the contact/lead does something specific to the scoring profile. Otherwise, the scoring profile remains stagnant.
In the case that a contact/lead has accumulated a score but has fallen inactive, you can set the “Additional Scoring Actions” function to gradually degrade their score over time. Additional Scoring Actions will force the record to rescore nightly after a specified amount of days of inactivity, until the score gradually degrades to zero.
The Additional Scoring Actions section reads as a sentence. There are four drop downs in this sentence that serve different purposes:
Rescore records after __ days of inactivity since __
And score events within __ days of today. Only score events after the date in __.
For the purpose of this documentation, we will set up Additional Scoring Actions for a business whose average sales cycle is 90 days long.
1. Rescore records after ___ days of inactivity
In the first dropdown, choose the number of days that you consider a reasonable amount of time of inactivity before a contact/lead’s lead score begins decreasing. Standard practice is about 30 to 90 days of inactivity.
For our example, we want to keep in mind that our sales cycle is average 90 days, or three months. In that case, we would consider a lead’s interest starting to decrease after they haven’t interacted with us for one month. Therefore, we are going to set this value to 30 days.
2. since ___
In the second dropdown, choose a field to reflect a starting point for this inactivity. This starting point can be any date field in the system. The default field for Sugar Market activity is "SalesfusionLastActivity", which measures the last time the contact/lead has interacted with any marketing efforts (EX: opened/clicked email, web activity, form submission, etc).
For our example, we are basing our inactivity off the contact/lead’s interaction with our Sugar Market activity, so we will set this value to standard and recommended "SalesfusionLastActivity".
3. and score events within ___ days of today.
In this third dropdown, you will choose the number of days that you would like the system to perform a rescore. Common practice is to keep this number in line with your team’s average sales cycle. This number acts as a “rolling window” of time beginning from the first day of inactivity and will continue to move forward until the lead score reaches zero. Any past activity that falls outside of the specified window of time will not be calculated in the new rescore.
- If you leave this field as “0”, the field will rescore based on the contact/lead’s entire history. In this case, the Additional Scoring Actions are no longer needed.
- If you enter a number equal to the number of days of inactivity, the score will also automatically roll to 0.
- If you enter a number less than the number of days of inactivity, the score will automatically roll back to 0.
- If you enter a number greater than the number of days of inactivity, the score will decrease based on how the points were originally accumulated.
For our example, we should keep in mind that our average sales cycle is 90 days and we are evaluating off 30 days of inactivity. Therefore, we want to find a number in the middle that will allow us to decrease the lead score gradually. To accommodate this, we will recalculate the rescore by looking at the past 60 days.
4. Only score events after the date in ___
This last dropdown is completely optional, depending on your business model. Here, you can add in a date field that you feel is more important than the days of inactivity. When the contact/lead reaches this date, their lead score will automatically roll back to 0, regardless of their activity. This field is helpful in cases where you want your contacts/leads to start with a “clean slate.” For example, when a contact/lead hits their renewal date or expiration date of their service and is now considered a viable lead again.
For our example, we will leave this value blank, as we do not have any date we consider important enough to overpower our gradual score degradation.
At the bottom of this section, there are two checkboxes:
1. Only score with new web activity
This first checkbox allows you to only recalculate a contact/lead’s score whenever they visit your website. While the contact/lead will continue to perform actions earning them a lead score, their new score total will NOT appear until they visit the website. Then, the system will force a rescore.
For example, imagine a scenario where we set up a rule where a contact/lead will receive 1 point each time they open an email, as well as a rule where the contact/lead receives 5 points for visiting our website. In addition, we check this box and choose to only score with new web activity.
We then have a lead, Sally, who receives and opens 10 of our emails, earning herself 10 points. However, her lead score is still reflected as “0” in Sugar Market. Then, Sally visits our website. This triggers Sugar Market to recalculate her lead score, since we have it set to only recalculate with new web activity. Now, Sally’s lead score is displaying as 15 points, which includes her previous 10 email opens, as well as her web activity. Now, as Sally accumulates more points, her score will not recalculate again until the next time she visits our website.
2. Share score across duplicate contacts
The second checkbox is typically used and highly recommended. If there are duplicate contact/lead records in Sugar Market that share the same email address, this feature will look at all the of the duplicates and add all the scores together. This combined score will then be displayed across all duplicate records, ensuring that their score stays consistent, despite having multiple records.
Created by Tina Nguyen