Maintaining Actual Lead Created Date

[Anonymous]

I have processes setup that only pass leads with a certain score into our CRM. What I am seeing happening is the lead create date is showing up as the date the lead goes to Salesforce. This is not the actual lead create date since the lead has been sitting in Marketo for x days/weeks/months/etc. Is there a way to have the actual create date match in both systems? This is really messing up my lead counts by week, month and quarter.

Thanks

[Anonymous]

Hey Christina, 

You need to be careful which fields you are looking at. There are two for created date:
- "Created": Date Lead was created in Mkto
- "SFDC Created Date": Date Lead was created in SFDC



The data you are looking for should be available for you. Is this for reporting in Mkto?

[Anonymous]

We have created a new Salesforce field called "Marketo create date time". I populate this field through Marketo just after the lead is created. This allows me to access both the Marketo create date and the Salesforce create date within Salesforce.

We actually combine both fields in a calculated time field (also for other date stamp combinations) to for instance calculate duration.

[Anonymous]

@Jeff - reporting is in Salesforce, I dont use Marketo reporting for things like this because it doesnt make sense for my company (and Im not a fan of the reporting)

[Anonymous]

@Diedrik - thanks. So you are pushing the Markto create date to SFDC when the lead is passed to sales? How are you combining the 2 fields? I just need more accuracy in leads created - right now they are so messy due to leads moving back and forth between the 2 systems. It's nearly impossible to create top-down reporting structures for pipeline predictive reports.

[Anonymous]

In Salesforce we have a calculated field that deducts the SF create date/time from the Marketo create date/time (custom SF field). In our case this results to Time-to-MQL. As we only push MQLs to Salesforce. Some leads are instantly MQL, but other leads could be nurtured for months before they become MQL. This allows us to report on how long it takes before a lead becomes MQL per lead source, campaign, business unit, and so on. We can even report on how this 'age' is evolving over time.

[Anonymous]

Diederik, I assume you are writing this date when the lead becomes known in Marketo (fills out form, etc).?
 The Marketo Create Date can be misleading as that's the date the lead was created anonymously.  That's good info to have but knowing the date a lead took action/become known is another create date in my mind.
 
The Lead Was Create filter accomplishes above but that’s no good in RCA or when you are trying to build other alerts.
 
Anyone else have a good solution they are using besides time stamping a lead when it becomes known/fills out a form/etc?

[Anonymous]

Hi Jeff, Yes, our custom Marketo-Create-Date field is stamped when it becomes know. I did however populate existing leads (prior to the intriduction of the field) with the normal Marketo create date, as that wa sthe best thing I had.