Best practices on suppressing engaged leads/contacts

[Anonymous]

Currently, all leads from marketing programs are passed to an Inside Sales team for follow-up/qualification. We're moving toward using lead scoring to act as a gatekeeper, but until then, here's our situation:
 

We run a lot of webinars, and when we do, we send an automated follow-up from the lead owner to registrants, which many times come from the ISRs. In some instances, the ISR has had several conversations and the lead/contact is nearly qualified. When that happens, I don't want to send out a cookie cutter message from the ISR. I'd like to be able to add some sort of flag that we'd then use in a smart list to exclude these people during follow up.

Does anyone have experience with a similar situation? We do the same for late stage prospect accounts, but it's a little trickier when these people could be a lead OR contact.

Thanks for the help!

[Anonymous]

How does your company utilize Lead Statuses? At mine, I would be able to exclude Leads who have a Lead Status indicative of someone who is further along in the sales cycle.

Another idea would be to utilize the "Activity was Logged" filter. If your reps are diligent about creating completed tasks for every phone call and/or email, you could set the fsubject to is not empty to any, timeframe to on or before the current day, or day of your webinar, then add the constraint "Min. number of times" to a number that you feel should say that this Lead/Contact is engaged and should not be receiving these emails.

Just a couple of ideas.

[Anonymous]

My first thought was lead status, but we also have contacts in the mix that may still be talking to a BDR. Part of that might be a process enhancement that we need to work through.

Thanks!