Best Practices for managing Inactive Leads in SFDC

[Anonymous]

I'm looking for ideas for managing inactive leads in Salesforce. 

I have leads that are members of multiple SFDC campaigns. Should I create a Marketo program that changes a lead's campaign status when they qualify as inactive?  If so, how would I set up the Marketo program to only update the SFDC campaigns that the lead is a member of?  Additionally, if the lead re-engages at some point (e.g., visits our website) how do I reactivate their SFDC campaign statuses?

Will it get too complicated if I'm trying to constantly sync statuses between Marketo and SFDC?  Would it be better to have just one field or campaign that records whether a lead is inactive?

Any advice is appreciated!

[Anonymous]

Hi Jim, I moved your question to Marketing Central for better visibility!

[Anonymous]

We have a checkbox for inactive which we use to to suppress those leads from entering new programs. I want to keep all the historical campaign information as well as lead progression history so we don't change anything in the lead.

If you don't want the information cluttering up SFDC, maybe export those leads with all related campaigns and delete them from SFDC. If that person re-engages they would be created as a new lead.

[Anna_Bruning1]

Hi Jim,

The difficulty with updating program statuses, is they are one directional. Marketo only allows leads to progress in one direction in a program, so they don't by accident get bumped back to invited and mess up your program stats.

We've actually used segments to track the last activity of our leads and used those to determine who gets emailed and who gets suppressed. We created a date field called Last Activity Date, which updates when someone clicks a link in an email, visits an landing page, fills out a form, etc. Then we have a segment based on that date that breaks down activity by Last 30 days, Last 60 days, Last 90 days, etc. This gives us a much more in-depth understanding of the activity level of our database and enables us to target groups that haven't been active for a while before they go totally cold.

Hope that helps!