I would love to hear the lead status definitions that other Marketo Users use.
We just reassigned responsibilities between our Sales Dev Reps and Account Execs which is forcing us to redefine our lead statuses. First off, here are the responsibilities:
Sales Dev Reps (SDR) Responsibilities: Qualifying Inbound & Marketing Qualified Leads, Outbound Prospecting, Concucting Discovery Calls for all leads interested in our product, and Scheduling Product Demos for our Account Executives.
Account Executives Responsibilities: Creating Opportunities for the lead when a Demo is scheduled, Delivering Product Demos, Writing & Negotiating Contracts, Closing Deals
Our Status Definitions Are:
Marketing Qualified: When a lead comes in through an inbound form, or an existing open lead reaches a lead score threshold, they become marketing qualified and an SDR is notified to respond.
Sales Qualified: An SDR reviews the lead and confirms that the lead is legit data and a target customer that we should go after. Upon determining this, they mark the lead as Sales Qualifed.
Sales Accepted: This is where we now have a conflict --- since we are now having the SDRs conducting the "discovery call" instead of our Account Executives(AE). Historically, Sales Accepted meant that an AE had conducted a discovery call and determined that they want to work the deal and are scheduling a demo and creating an opportunity. But now, since the SDRs are doing the "discovery calls" and scheduling the demos for the AE and creating an opportunity in salesforce themselves, it seems to be broken.
How do other organizations define Sales Accepted? Our Options: 1) An SDR says this is good data and a qualified company, marks them as Sales Qualified, then conducts a discovery call and schedules a demo for the AE and marks them as Sales Accepted.
2) When an AE wants the lead, they mark it as sales accepted. BAD CHOICE: because we dont want a bunch of leads sitting at Sales Qualified. We want to get them to Sales Accepted as soon as possible.
3) We ditch the "Sales Qualified" status and just have one, called Sales Accepted. BAD CHOICE: This will not allow us to have complete visibility of where leads are in our pipeline and where they are getting "stuck" - i.e. areas where we can improve and keep an eye on specific individual reps.
Would love to hear how other companies are defining their lead statuses and the sales process associated to them. Again, we do both inbound and outbound sales. Also, our product is a SAAS product with a 3month sales cycle.
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