What do you primarily create for follow-up? Leads vs Tasks

[Ryan_Spaulding]

Hey all,

I'm just now back in Marketo after about 4 years in Eloqua, and at my new org we are dealing with some of the same issues I had in the past with Marketo in a large org. 

Both orgs use the lead object in SFDC for basically everything. It makes some sense, as this is what SFDC makes easy for conversion and attribution to campaigns. This becomes a problem when Marketo knows the form-filler, as it will want to generate a task on the contact record vs new leads. Only new people become "lead" objects in SFDC.

So I was attempting to go down the path of challenging Marketo to make this work more like Eloqua, where we have the freedom to create new leads, but I wanted to check with you all first.

Are you using the lead object in SFDC as what sales follows up on? It's starting to feel like it should only be tasks we generate, and lead objects are handled perhaps by marketing to add to accounts. new SFDC leads are created manually by what amounts to an inside sales function, driven to action by the appropriate status in an SFDC campaign. 

We have dupes galore and thousands of unactioned "leads" sitting in queues by the former team. And tasks for follow-up are being missed.

I'd appreciate any feedback here or any insights you have. I'm only 3 weeks back in and the heat is on to fix the mess!

[Josh_Hill13]

Every firm does something different. You can search around the forum for ideas. The most common situation is:

• Create net new SFDC Lead
  • Send Alert Email and/or
  • Create Task for Lead Owner
  • depends on how your team is tracked or wants to hear about net new people.
• SFDC Contacts & Existing Records
  • depends on point in funnel
    • MQLs will get alerts or Tasks
    • Opps or Customers will get an alert or a task
    • Usually Sales likes Tasks here, but not everyone.

Note here that I have 2-3 separate processes where I look at

• Net New Record
• Existing SFDC Lead
• Existing SFDC Contact
• and where are they in the funnel?

If you have unfollowed up Leads and Tasks you need a report on those, how long ago they became MQL, and work out with Sales what to do:

•   What to do with existing group that may be stale
• Find more recent to reassign and call
• Create new process

Other firms like to automate Lead to Contact. to Account. There are tools for this. It's not perfect and requires more discipline by everyone.

[Ryan_Spaulding]

Thanks for the response Josh! I really appreciate the insight. 

[Nicholas_Manojl]

If you really want to create a Lead, you can run a Contact through a Sync to SFDC flow step and assign them to a Queue. This will create a duplicate Lead. 

It's not a good idea though because we won't ever have an association between the Lead and Contact, and they will be two independent records. Depending on what CRM or software you've used before, this is either a really weird concept or a perfectly logical concept. For my Marketo brain (and because of the way Marketo works), I definitely don't want to have a Lead and a Contact of the same person without any association.