A marketing team asked me a reasonable question: if we lower the points for an email open, will existing scores drop? The answer is yes and no, because their account was scoring opens in two places.
Two systems, one number
- Baseline scoring rules live in the account settings. They assign points to activity types. When you change one, Account Engagement re-scores existing prospects and tells you how many will be affected before you save. Expect those records to sync to Salesforce afterwards.
- Completion actions on individual emails and forms can also adjust score. These are one-time adjustments. They are added at the moment the action fires and are never recalculated.
The prospect’s score is the sum of both. If every email carries a completion action that adds a large number on open, the baseline rule for opens is almost irrelevant, and changing it will not undo the inflation already recorded.
How to tell which you have
- Open a high-scoring prospect and read the activity history. Completion-action adjustments appear as their own entries.
- Check a sample of sent emails for score-adjusting completion actions.
- Compare what the baseline rules alone would produce for that prospect with the score on the record.
What I usually recommend
If completion actions have been inflating scores for a long time, adjusting baseline rules will not fix it. Decide on one mechanism, remove the other going forward, and reset scores so the model starts clean. Warn sales before the reset, because every threshold-based automation and report will move on the same day.