As a marketer and Pardot user, you have probably found yourself in the situation where you need to both push prospect records to take advantage of Salesforce reporting while not assigning these leads to the sales team until they are ‘ready to buy’.
After all, when it comes to reporting and sharing your success with your stakeholders, Pardot only allows limited reporting visibility (most stakeholders do not even have access to Pardot).
The question then becomes: how can you share the leads generated on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, no matter if these leads are marketing qualified, or not?
Quick answer: push all the leads into Sales Cloud by assigning them.
If you assign all these leads in Sales Cloud, won’t you be frustrating your sales team with unqualified leads? Experienced Pardot users will also know that once a prospect record is assigned, the Salesforce ‘Lead owner’ field becomes the master value, and therefore, you are unable to reassign the prospect from Pardot when a prospect becomes a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL).
The better answer: using Salesforce Queues, you can ‘park’ all non-marketing qualified leads in a ‘Marketing’ queue for reporting purposes in Sales Cloud, but also allows these leads to be reassigned to a SDR queue once they have reached their scoring threshold to become an MQL.
Note: our solution is quite simple but we would recommend discussing the impacts on making this change with your Salesforce Admin first.
Step 1: Create a Marketing Queue in Salesforce
From Salesforce Setup, enter ‘Queues’ into the Quick Find box, select Queues, then click ‘New’ on the page that loads:
Enter a label and a queue name. Our queue is called ‘Marketing Queue’; upon adding the label, Salesforce automatically populates the Queue Name.
Next, we need to choose the object this queue should support; in our use case, we choose the Lead object.
Optionally, you can add a Queue Email as well as adding members to the Queue for notification purposes when a Lead has been placed in the Queue. As we are using this Queue for ‘parking-only’ purposes, we have left these options blank:
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save. You can now see the Queue set up in your Salesforce org:
Step 2: Map the Queue into Pardot
In this step we will map the Marketing Queue we have just created into Pardot so it is ready to be used in your Completion Actions and Automation Rules to assign prospects.
In Pardot Lightning, click on Pardot Settings, navigate to User Management → Users. From here, click on View Queues:
On the next screen, click on the blue ‘Add Queue’ button:
Find the Marketing Queue in the dropdown and click on ‘Create Queue’:
Step 3: Assign Prospects to the Marketing Queue
The Marketing Queue is now ready to use, so let’s assign some prospects to it. To ensure that all prospects are being assigned to the Queue, you want to build some automation in Pardot.
Note: you may already have other MQL completion actions in place for some of your forms which assign prospects to other queues/sales users when a form is completed. For these forms that are considered high-value/MQL forms, you can keep these as is.
Consider doing an audit of all your forms in Pardot and work out which forms you’d like to add the completion action to, to assign the Prospect to the Marketing Queue. Examples of these could be Newsletter forms, blog forms, forms that gate certain content, webinar registrations etc.
This will now ensure that all the Pardot activity is surfaced into Sales Cloud and you can use it to set up some key Marketing reports and dashboards.
Step 4: Identify your MQL/SQL threshold
Now decide on your marketing qualified lead threshold. In our example, we are using Pardot Score, where we consider a score of 100+ to be an MQL. Of course, your criteria could be different, such as:
- Grading
- A mix of Scoring & Grading – i.e. Score = 100 and Grade = B (also known as ‘blended’ scoring and grading)
- Scoring Categories.
Step 5: Decide on your Reassignment setup
Once you have established your reassignment criteria, you will need to decide how the lead should be reassigned, for example to:
- An internal sales (SDR/BDR) queue?
- A specific sales person?
- A lead assignment framework to the business (eg. active lead assignment rules)?
For our use case, we are reassigning the lead to an SDR queue.
First, create the SDR queue by following Step 1. This time, we will add a Queue Email as well as Members, and tick the notify box as we’d want the SDRs to be notified if a new lead hits the queue:
! Important: repeat step 2 to map this Queue into Pardot.
Step 6: Build a Workflow Rule for Reassignment
Now that we have set up the reassignment criteria and the SDR queue, we need to build the workflow rule to reassign the leads from the marketing queue, to the SDR queue.
From Salesforce Setup, enter “Workflow Rules” in the Quick Find box, select Workflow Rules. Then on the next page, click New Rule:
On the next page, from the dropdown, choose Lead and click next:
- Enter a Rule Name and optional Description.
- Evaluation Criteria: choose ‘created, and any time it’s edited and subsequently meet criteria’ as we do want this rule to trigger again in case a Score is met and then goes over 100 again.
- Rule Criteria: toggle to ‘Run this rule if formula evaluates to true’ and add the following formula:
AND(Owner:Queue.DeveloperName =”Marketing_Queue”, pi__score__c >99)
When you click Save & Next, the next page looks like the below image. From here, you’d want to click on ‘Add Workflow Action’ and choose ‘New Field Update’ from the dropdown:
- Enter a Name for the Field Update which we call SDR-Reassignment and optional Description (the unique name will populate automatically)
- ‘Field to Update’ is the Lead Owner, so choose that from the dropdown.
- Upon choosing that, the section ‘Specify New Field Value’ will become visible. Here we choose ‘Queue’ from the dropdown and then find the SDR team queue via the Lookup field by clicking on the magnifying glass. You can leave Notify Assignee unticked as we have set that up on the Queue.
Click Save!
The next page shows an overview of the Workflow Rule, click ‘Done’ in the top right corner:
We are almost there, the last step to complete is to active the rule:
Step 7: Let’s Test!
Here’s a prospect who has submitted the newsletter form, has currently a Score of 30, and is assigned to the Marketing Queue:
Upon submitting another form (increasing the Score to 100), the Assigned User has changed to the SDR team:
Who’s Behind the Solution?
We have seen many organisations and marketers struggling with this challenge and hope that this solution will help solve some of these. A special thank you goes to the members of the focus group we have built for this topic and the time they have dedicated to it:
- Ling Lee – Salesforce Consultant, Destined
- Tammy Begley – Pardot Practice Lead, Destined
- Lindsey Mark – Salesforce B2B Marketing Partner Enablement, Pardot
- Ben La Mothe – Pardot Solutions Architect, BDO USA
- Lara Black – Marketing Operations Manager, League
- Jen Kazin – Independant Consultant, Greenkey
- Becka Miller – Senior Consultant, Slalom
The next use case we have looked at is how to manage re-engaged Contacts with Task Queues since Pardot does not create a new Lead when an existing Contact re-engages…stay tuned.
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