Best practices for handling requests from Marketo form fills and from email in Salesforce

[Levi_Halvorsen]

We have a solution where Marketo is synced to Salesforce.

We receive requests from mainly two different channels, from Marketo forms on our website and from an info@ email address.

Today these two channels are handled very differently. The email requests are handled in a shared exchange email account.

Some of our challenges are:

- We don't have one place to find all incoming inquires

- We don't have a good way of ensuring that each inquiry has been handled

- We don't have a good way of ensuring not more than one person is handling the same incoming inquires

- We don't have a good way of following up on Sales if they have handled the MQLs that Marketing has sent them

We think a good way to set up the system would be to send all inquires to Salesforce as cases in a Marketing queue.

Is this the best solution? What are the best practices for handling requests from Marketo form fills and from email in Salesforce?

[Ruchi_Lapran1]

Hi Levi,

These are some commonly faced challenges that Marketing and Sales teams usually encounter. Marketing touchpoints are sometimes not correctly tagged and as a result, they don’t get credit for their efforts.

On the other hand, if lead assignment rules are not in place, the same inquiry might end up landing in multiple queues.

Overall what I observe is missing are:

1. MQL criteria and task creation for sales.

2. Staging and assignment rules in Marketo and SFDC.

3. Sales acceptance and processing rules in CRM.

My recommendation would be to build a robust lead journey from the Marketing side stretching towards Sales covering all the MQL defining rules, and assigning them to the sales queue so the sales team can work on them towards the end goal.

[Vinay_Kumar]

Hi @Levi_Halvorsen ,

Agreed with @Ruchi_Lapran1 , lead management is missing here. You need a lead management plan so that you can work on defining the lead journey. You need to work on Lead source tracking, data cleansing, lead scoring etc. This will help you pass the quality information to sales. 

Similarly, you need to plan lead management in Salesforce as well. Lead management in the Salesforce includes:

• Define a process to track lead source and type 
• Lead status values such as Open, Working, Recycled, Disqualified, Opportunity, etc. This will help in identifying if the lead is open or salesperson is working on it. 
• Assigning Leads to sales