Alternate CRM solutions for cold leads

[Hank_Hansen]

We'd like to keep cold lead lists out of Salesforce/Marketo until they have been qualified at which point they would be eligible for Salesforce/Marketo. I'm curious what solutions other Sales/Marketing Ops folks are using for this approach. Services such as LiveHive seem to offer the feature set we'd need.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Hank,

on the contrary, we usually push these cold leads to the CRM, in order to keep Marketo and the CRM consistent for reporting and avoid the creation of duplicates by the sales when they make contact on their own (phone, customer meeting, etc...)

The trick is to set up lead queues in SFDC and assignment rules so that the cold leads are not pushed to sales. And whey the become MQL , you just have to change hteir owner.

-Greg

[Erik_Eaton]

Agree with Greg,

You should sync to avoid duplicates.

Depending on how your SFDC is set up, you could assign all lead initially to a marketing user or into a "cold lead queue" when they initially sync over. Once a lead moves to a new status such as "Qualified - Hot" or "MQL" you can then process the lead to be routed to the rep based on territory or into a new lead queue.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

HI Erik

Always prefer queues to individual users. Individual users quit or change jobs, queues don't and it's easy to make a new user a member of a queue than reworking all your lead assignment campaigns.

-Greg

[Hank_Hansen]

So my Marketo database would increase with lots of cold, unqualified leads that convert at a low rate, increasing my Marketo pricing tier. I don't the numbers would make sense. How do you guys justify the cost, presuming we're talking about the same thing - cold, unqualified leads.

[Erik_Eaton]

Hank,

How I built it out was.

Cold, Unqualified Sales Leads Imported.

• Full Sync (for interaction and scoring if they visited pricing page, etc)
• Rigorous data hygiene, typically if lead didnt interact with any contact or fill a optin form I would scrub them out after the sales cadence / outreach.
• If they did optin, I would wait until after the sale cadence and send them through a nurture program

Cold, Unqualified Marketing imported leads.

• Full Sync
• Send to Salesforce under marketing user
• Nurture Lead until it was "marketing qualified"
• Send an alert to sales owner of the leads territory and add route the lead to the rep, plus use a list view with filters so the sales rep can easily identify.

To us the cost was worth it, as long as we kept good data hygiene processes so it doesn't get out of hand and keeps us in our database limit.

[SanfordWhiteman]

I'm gonna go against the grain and be with Hank on this one.

I look at such lists as being the opposite of suppression lists.  Impression lists, if you will. (Talking about people you will not be contacting via Marketo until a separate action occurs.)

You want them to be available to Marketo in case somebody enters the system on their (in which case you want to enrich the new lead with the existing data) and also available to Sales to manually push to Marketo.

We've done this by storing the leads in a Google Sheet. A Marketo webhook can do the enrichment part on demand, and other automation can push the people to SFDC or Marketo.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Hank,

At the end of the day, this really depends on what you plan to do with these leads. If your do not intend to Market them anyway, you are right, it's not worth adding them to your Marketo database, and even less to SFDC. You can keep them in a separate, low cost storage, and use the data if they come back. On the contrary, if you intend to send them campaign to reactivate them or nurture them, you need to keep them in Marketo as long as you keep marketing them, since each time you delete them from Marketo you also loose all historical data about them.

My first answer was, as soon as you have them in Marketo, you might want to have them in SFDC.

Another consideration to have is the data attrition rate that is a about 30% per year. Meaning that after a year, 30% of the people data would have changed if they have not been updated. Best case is they have changed jobs and therefore belong to a different buyer persona. Worst case is they have left the company and their email address is invalid. Free email addresses are slightly (but only slightly) better, because people tend to keep their personal email address longer than their job, at least on good quality ESPs.

-Greg

[Hank_Hansen]

Good insights all around - thanks for sharing!

If we decide to keep them out of SFDC until they engage, I was hoping to find a sales acceleration service (along the lines of LiveHive) that would enable sales to pass a lead into SFDC & Marketo once the lead has engaged and is qualified for further nurturing.