SLA for uploading/assigning Event Leads

[Michelle_Tang3]

Hi Marketo Community! Looking for on average how long most companies takes from when the event is over to getting leads assigned to your sales team. What's the timeframe it takes exactly and/or do you have an SLA put in place?

[Josh_Hill13]

Depends on the firm and process.

We set a 48hr SLA.

But, in all seriousness, do you really need to get the leads in there that fast? Every lead is getting calls right afterward, before they even get back to the office. I know that could be impt, but it is perceived as irritating.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Considering that Marketo does not allow you to designate a custom date for when a lead attended an event (and for Acquisition Program Date if this is the first time the lead is entering Marketo), it's important to get these entered into the program ASAP so that the "attended" date is as close to the event as possible.  This is most important for reporting purposes.  And those that are MQLs should also be routed as soon as possible so that Sales can manage the actual lead record in CRM - and progress it appropriately.  Again, most important for reporting purposes.

[Loren_Posendek]

I know this varies across organizations and there are a lot of outliers (lead scanner devices vs. not, notes entered vs. not) that make setting a firm SLA more difficult. The short answer is work with your sales team to determine an SLA that makes sense given the number of events your organization attends, and the number of leads your sales team manages. 

We're working on streamlining our process to get our event leads to sales team faster. Here are some things we utilize today that help create a repeatable process:

• Utilize an import template of fields that you require a record to have in order to be a record in both Marketo and our CRM (outside of just the standard requirements)
• Determine if all leads are treated the same, or if you'd like different routing rules based upon conversations (we consider this our 'lead strength' and have different routing rules based upon the strength)
• Create an event program template and automate it as much as possible - we just revamped our event processing template in Marketo so our MOPs team only has to import a list, then parse it a few times -  the smart campaigns do the rest.

These things really make a world of difference. Hope that helps!