Contact and Account Statuses for prospects and customers

[Anonymous]

How are people handling statuses once the lead is passed over to sales and it's converted from a lead to a contact/account in Salesforce?

When a lead is converted to a contact, the contact status is independent of the account status. Meaning that you can have a contact with an early-stage status (such as Engaged or Suspect) that's attached to a customer account. 

On one hand, I think that the contact status should equal account status. Given that Marketo maps Lead Status to the contact in Salesforce, it would be important to have the contact status in SFDC = account status to ensure customers, open opportunities, etc are marketed to appropriately, if at all.

On the other hand, once an account is a customer, you could theoretically treat contacts associated with that account as leads if there is additional buying cycles for cross-sell or up-sell opportunities. 

Further, in the event that an opportunity is lost, the contacts & account could get recycled back into the marketing/nurturing process as leads. If this is the case, than the lead statuses/stages available for leads, should also be available for contacts... right?

There's a few different ways we could manage this, but I'm looking for best practice. We're using the Demand Waterfall for tracking buying cycle, but I'm not sure the best method for setting statuses for the full customer lifecycle.

[Anonymous]

The best way I have found is to make people move linearly through Salesforce. With SQL defined by conversion from lead to contact done by the field. Progression is defined by updated to lead status ( can be timestamped) Now this doesn't answer all of your question but it gives you a foundation.

[Josh_Hill13]

I think you need to setup a workflow that sets Contact Statuses by Account Status.

You might have to choose values that match the lifecycle and your product. For instance, some Contacts are just users or influencers. Some might be leads for new sales, but part of a larger Account - Client.

You can easily recycle contacts as long as you have the right statuses. Perhaps you need two:

-Contact Account Status
-Contact Lifecycle Status

[Anonymous]

Thanks Josh - are you aware of any articles or documentation on different or best practice methods of handling contact statuses? 

[Anonymous]

I create a new Contact Status and try to mirror what's in Leads as much as I can.

And then just like Josh said, you can build in some workflow that will adjust the Contact statuses based on the Account statuses.

Here's an example of Lead to Contact life-cycle process: it includes the process of adding new leads into SFDC from Marketo, then converting them to Contacts for "new customers" - and then re-engaging them to subsequent sales "existing customers":


The goal is to get lots of people into the green squares!

Hope that's helpful.