Getting Fancy with Pardot Grades
I recently had an interesting requirement come up where the client wanted to grade Prospects based on their purchasing power. Sounds simple enough, right?
Not quite. Based on how Prospect grading in Pardot works you start at a grade D and then can increment or decrement a Prospect's score by a full letter grade, or by 1/3 or two 2/3s of a grade. In Pardot, you can’t use a single criterion to set the grade of the Prospect directly (i.e. from D to A directly) but instead need to use multiple criteria to go from D to A.
Here are the outcomes we were looking for:
Purchasing Power: $5-10M grade as "A"
Purchasing Power: $1-5M grade as "B"
Anyone else grade as "C"
The Solution
A picklist field I called "Qualifications Count" (not pre-filled with any values) with dropdown options of 1, 2 and 3.
A single Profile with 3 criteria--each increasing the Pardot score by 1 full grade
An Automation Rule that updates all Prospects to the Profile, matches Profile Criterion 1, and updates the Qualifications Count field to 1.
A second Automation Rule that has criteria that the Qualifications Count field is 1, Purchasing Power is $1-5M or $5-10M, and then matches Profile Criterion 2 and sets the Qualifications Count to 2.
A third Automation Rule that has criteria that the Qualifications Count field is 2, that Purchasing Power is $5-10M, and then matches Profile Criterion 3, and updates the Qualifications Count field to 3.
An Automation Rule that updates all Prospects to the Profile, matches Profile Criterion 1, and updates the Qualifications Count field to 1.
A second Automation Rule that has criteria that the Qualifications Count field is 1, Purchasing Power is $1-5M or $5-10M, and then matches Profile Criterion 2 and sets the Qualifications Count to 2
A third Automation Rule that has criteria that the Qualifications Count field is 2, that Purchasing Power is $5-10M, and then matches Profile Criterion 3, and updates the Qualifications Count field to 3
Note: it's not required to update the Qualification Count to 3 on the last Automation Rule, but I did so I can quickly run an audit report to ensure anything with a Qualified Count of 3 matches a grade of "A" and so forth.
Also note: What moves the grade up in each Automation Rule is when the "Profile Criteria" matches.
That's it! You can use this approach in Pardot for many different use cases. Whether it's credit worthiness in the financial services sector, or donor contribution level in the non-profit space!
