Campaign Operations
Eloqua
A global research and professional services company with 2,500 employees needed a better way to qualify leads before they reached Sales. By redesigning scoring, introducing grading and improving qualification rules, the team increased trust in MQL quality and made lead prioritisation more accurate.
Sales teams were receiving leads that looked qualified but often lacked real buying intent.
The existing scoring model gave too many points for low-value activities and reduced scores too slowly when prospects stopped engaging. As a result, inactive leads could still appear highly qualified.
The setup was also difficult to maintain. Scoring values were spread across Completion Actions, Automation Rules and Engagement Studio programmes. Even a simple scoring change required updates in multiple places.
During the review, we found another issue. Some prospects had extremely high positive scores, whilst others had very large negative scores from previous attempts to fix the model. There was also no grading system to confirm whether a prospect matched the organisation's ideal customer profile.
The goal was to make lead qualification reflect real buyer interest, not just activity volume.
The team focused on fixing the scoring architecture rather than changing a few scoring values. This created a qualification framework that can be maintained and improved over time.
The biggest improvement was confidence in lead qualification. Marketing gained a clearer way to measure engagement, whilst Sales received leads that better reflected both interest and customer fit. Day-to-day discussions moved away from lead volume and towards lead quality.
The scoring model stopped measuring activity. It started measuring intent.
Before the project, high scores often came from actions that had little connection to real buying interest. The system rewarded volume of activity more than qualification quality.
After recalibration, scoring focused on behaviours that better indicate purchase intent. This reduced the impact of inflated engagement signals and improved lead prioritisation.
The grading model added another layer of quality control. Prospects no longer qualified purely because they were active. They also needed to match the organisation's target customer profile.
The centralised scoring framework also reduced maintenance work. Future scoring changes can now be managed from one place instead of updating multiple assets and automation programmes.
Sales received higher-quality MQLs because qualification now combines buyer engagement with customer fit.
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