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Rant: That one Tuesday where our entire lead scoring model just... broke
So last quarter, we pushed a 'simple' update to our lead scoring rules in Marketo. The idea was to give more points for webinar attendance, which seemed smart. By 10 AM Tuesday, our sales team was screaming. The dashboard showed 500 'hot' leads from a single small business in Boise, all from the same IP. The model had a loop where attending one webinar gave points, which triggered a 'high intent' tag, which auto-invited them to another webinar, giving MORE points. It created a feedback loop that flooded the pipeline with junk. We had to shut the whole program down for 48 hours while we rebuilt the logic from scratch. It made me question if these complex scoring systems are more trouble than they're worth sometimes. Has anyone else had a scoring rule blow up in a way that made you want to just go back to basics?
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daniel_gonzalez2mo ago
That Boise situation is a perfect example of why we started adding a weekly point cap per lead source. You can have all the fancy rules you want, but if one action can't add more than, say, 25 points in a seven day period, you stop the runaway train. It lets the complex model work without letting a glitch fill the pipe with junk. We built that in after a similar mess with our demo request form.
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emeryj662mo ago
You mentioned building in circuit breakers, but that's just adding more complex rules to fix a broken system. Sometimes the simplest answer is to admit the scoring model itself is the problem. Going back to basics cuts the risk and often works just as well.
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daniel_gonzalez2mo ago
Ever think the problem isn't the scoring system, but the fact we keep building them without a simple off switch? That feedback loop is a classic logic trap, but it's also a test case that should have been caught. A complex model is fine if you build in circuit breakers to stop a single lead from maxing out the score. Going back to basics just means you'll miss real signals because you're scared of the tools.
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