Capturing original Lead Status for downstream reporting

[Anonymous]

I understand that what I'm about to describe is a common issue... I think I have a Marketo-way to address it, but want to hear some feedback and other experiences.

First, we have Marketo and Salesforce integrated.

A question the demand gen team is often asked goes something like this "How many MQLs were created last month?"

Strictly speaking, there is no way to directly answer that question, because what was created as an MQL in July converted to an opportunity, or to a disqualified status in August. Salesforce is a state machine that knows where things are today, but doesn't 'remember' where things started out.

A variant question is, "Of the Unqualified leads that entered the system in June, how many progressed to MQL status in July?"

Again, a simple report of leads by create month=June reports their *current* status, not their original status, or differential.

And, no, history tracking on the status field in the lead record doesn't help, because there isn't really any viable way to pull reports on that and tie it to other data that's needed.

So it seems to me that something that would help is a Marketo rule (can't use Workflow rules - only available in SFDC EE...) that sets an "original status" field on creation:

trigger on new lead

set Original Status field equal to lead status

lock down/never change Original Status

So that when leads are created, their original status is captured for future reporting against. So we could look at leads created in June - Original Status - and compare to current status.

I'd like to hear from others on if/how they have addressed this in a similar or related fashion.

[Josh_Hill13]

Yes, this is very common to have Original Lead Source and Lead Source, with the OLS field blocked in both systems so it cannot be edited.

But this has nothing to do with your MQL tracking. You need something like RCE + RCM, or you can try some of the options in my talk with Jeff Coveney:

Sessions – The Marketing Nation Summit, April 13-15, 2015 – Marketo

[Anonymous]

No - I'm not talking about Lead SOURCE but Lead STATUS - capturing original lead STATUS.

This is essentially doing one stage date stamp, at the beginning.

Full-blown stage date stamping is the next step, but that can have problems too, as it generally assumes leads move only in one direction.

[Justin_Norris1]

David Howard​

The simplest way I've seen to answer a lot of these questions is with two fields, Original MQL Date and Most Recent MQL Date.

They are pretty much what they sound like and you update them with some Marketo Smart Campaigns and a {{system.date}} token.

From there it's a simple step to add in date stamping for other fields as well, although this does become unwieldy (think backwards journeys and all that fun stuff) and is the point at which RCE or a tool like Full Circle makes life easier.

Question about "original lead status" -- wouldn't all leads start out at your initial status, e.g. "Open" or something similar? Or do you have a lot of leads entering via CRM with a different original status?