Freshsales CRM & Email Marketing

Background

We/Tern have used Freshsales for CRM and Mailchimp for email campaigns.
Email campaigns have been limited to new acquisition announcements only
Bharath is working on a "Tern Academy" to capture all the value creation insights into a digestible / publishable format on Notion.

Outcomes required

Send the content (blogs/whitepapers) on a weekly or bi-weekly basis by email using an email marketing tool (TBC). Email will contain only a snippet of the content. Recipients would have to click on a link to go to the Tern website where the full content would be visible.
By "visible" on the website, we want this to happen through Notion / Wordpress sync. Tern is hosted on Wordpress. We are looking to use this tool
Email Target recipients are only owner/managers in Freshsales (tagged as "TG-")
We want to setup lead scoring to capture a) recipients' open/clicks and b) any dwell time on the Tern website

Challenges

Mailchimp doesn't seem to integrate with Freshsales. This would suggest moving to Freshmarketer.
Freshmarketer lead scoring remains a mystery - as Bharat seems to have discovered with MetaBroadcast. So I am loath to go to a tool that promises something but we can't figure out how the black box works
Worst case, we move to a different email marketing tool that integrates better with Freshsales

The lead score is an absolute score calculated based on the rules that the admin user sets for the client. A percentile view also exists in the Freshsales instance - more on that later.
You will find the rules here (https://mbst.freshsales.io/settings/lead_score_customization).

The score depends on 4 broad categories and several sub criteria in each of those categories (Lead property, Email activity, Application activity and web activity). You can pick and choose - For e.g., Rules for Metabroadcast (’MB’) are set only for Lead property and Email activity categories.
The score is an absolute score. The varying lead property could result in huge range of scores (-ve scores to 1000s) from different campaigns and the email activity levels across contacts.
When you browse through the scores for MB, you could spot contacts with -ve scores. The -ve scoring for some contacts/leads is likely due to one of the rules that allows for points to be subtracted for e.g., a rule that awards -ve points for every "Do not disturb" outcome.

The M$ question is how can one recalculate the score? It is not possible as the score is calculated by a Machine learning program (or so they claim) and the methodology will not be shared. It is indeed a blackbox.
On Freshmarketer - You can either pull leadscore from Freshsales or customise your lead score. For e.g., For Metabroadcast we’ve set a customised score in Freshmarketer on the following rules:

The entire leadscoring system exists for us to find out which leads / contacts are Hot/Warm and which ones are not. Freshmarketer does not do the job. The best way to spot a Hot or warm lead is directly on Freshsales instance (not freshmarketer). You will find it directly in Freshsales > Leads > All Leads. This presents a percentile score based on rules we've set and updates real time. As you can see below lead scores that show the top ‘Hot’ leads and their respective scores and movement generated from a report available on Freshsales.