Lead leads to a different Contact who is the real Decision-Maker what do you do?

[Anonymous]

Hi,
Some percentage of Leads marketing delivers to Sales are just an indicator of a project brewing at the organization.  My Inside Sales Team would like togive credit to marketing for opening up an Opportunity.  The idea is to create mirror fields on the Lead record to store the Original Lead contact information but then allow the sales person to replace the First name Last name Title and Email of the original lead  with the new contact information. This will cause issues in Marketo because then the Original Lead with Success is lost.  So I was thinking I could build a trigger to detect when the Original lead is changed and then create a new lead to replace the one that is changed and add that new Lead to the original program as a Member.  But, this seems very risky.  Does anyone have any ideas?  What do you do if a Lead you genenrate isn't "the person" who participates in the buying decision; but, the lead does allow Sales to get a foot in the door with a prospect?
I tried to convince the team to use the SFDC Clone process to create a new lead when a marketing lead opens a door and uncovers a decision-maker contact.  But, the Sales team think that is too hard!  I could have a trigger built in SFDC to add the Cloned Lead to the SFDC Campaign and then in turn add as a member to the Marketo Program but but as a "new Uncovered contact" which I could define as a a "SUCCESS".
I would be interested in hearing ideas.
thanks
Kristen

[Anonymous]

Kristen,

You bring up a very valid point, and one that troubles many organizations. Many of the deals that are eventually won start from a more junior person that marketing has cultivated and then Sales uses that person to climb up the organizational ladder.

There are a few different approaches to this, but the one that I am currently using, is asking my sales team to put everyone in the company that is listed in our CRM under the opportunity as a contact role. This will ensure that marketing gets the appropriate initiated and influenced pipeline as long as your campaigns are setup correctly.