Best practice when our own employees become leads

[david-zweben]

We're running a drip program in Marketo, and a handful of our own employees have signed up and become leads, probably to see the deliverables. We want to make sure the way we're treating these is in-line with best practices. We can see a few potential approaches:

1. Treat them like any other lead; let them sync to our CRM if they qualify, and Sales can classify them as a dead lead
2. Create a new lead status specifically for this case, such as “Internal”, that they would hit instead of qualifying
3. Block these people from entering our programs and lead list entirely
4. Allow these people into our programs, but block them from becoming qualified leads
5. Create a separate custom field on Leads that indicates this type of person, e.g. “Is Internal” and use that to prevent CRM sync

In terms of best-practices, what would be the best way to handle this?

Thanks,

David

[Frank_Elley]

For me this has always been the classic no-win situation. If you allow them to go through to Sales, it's just noise for them. If you don't allow them to go through to Sales, people get hysterical and call you up at 1 a.m. to tell you the lead gen forms are broken.

Here's my ideal solution: At the moment when you detect a lead from an employee, don't process it as an MQL (using whatever method would work in your situation, but I just give them a Rejected status and assign to a holding queue). Send an auto email back to the employee saying something like this: "Hey, we notice that you work at XYZ. We haven't passed the lead on to Sales (because it is distracting for them) or sent it into our nurture programs (because it dilutes our metrics). If you're trying to accomplish any of the following tasks, use the links below for instructions. (And then have a bulleted list that links to doc on how to submit test leads, or how to get marketing assets like white papers without registering.) For other concerns, email us at marketingops@xyz.com, or submit a ticket (link to Service Now, Jira, whatever)." It does require you to have built some test procedures that will siphon off test leads before they hit Sales (different topic). Only issue here is that some people still won't use the procedures, but at least you are on record as having a process for them to follow, and their 1 a.m. call will no longer be justifiable.

[Amy_Goldfine]

We marketing suspend employees, which keeps them from getting marketing emails but allows them to get confirmation emails and other operational emails. 

We restrict them from becoming members of programs such as gated content (they can fill out the form and get the asset on the website but not program member or SFDC campaign) to keep the program membership data clean. They can register for webinars but we have a smart campaign to remove them after the webinar to keep the data clean.

[Ric_Kolibar]

We use a smart campaign filter in the send alert and sync to SFDC step, that says email does not contain "@yourcompany.com" 

This filters out all the employee emails, that can still sign up with their personal emails.